Read the full article: Top 5 Online Subscriptions You Can Give As Gifts
It’s a skill which few people have perfected; the perfect meeting minutes. It’s a familiar story in an imperfect world. You’re working on a project of critical importance at work. This is an inter-departmental affair, with all the painful inter-departmental politics that comes with that. As the deadline looms with the project no closer to completion, you schedule a meeting with your colleagues. After setting an agenda for the meeting and two hours of tedious discussion, you end up with an agreed schedule and plan of action. And then the agreed schedule isn’t met, and the agreed plan of action...
Read the full article: Make The Minutes Work: How To Take Effective Notes During A Meeting
Here’s one more reason for everyone to hate Mondays. They’re supposedly the busiest days for email spam, that frustrating stream of unsolicited emails about weight loss, Viagra, million-dollar lotteries, and what not. It might be next to impossible to stop spam completely, but it’s certainly possible to reduce its flow to a trickle. We have already covered ways to tackle Facebook spam , Twitter spam, and spam from friends. In this post, we’ll tell you how to control email spam. Unfortunately, the option to stop unwanted emails from piling up in your inbox is not available as a one-click solution....
Read the full article: What Everybody Ought to Know About Dealing With Email Spam
Do you want to send a file across the Internet to a friend or coworker, but don’t want the NSA to snoop on that file? You’ll want to encrypt that file, but in the quickest and easiest way possible. Thanks to various web technologies, you can now do this without even having to deal with a heavier desktop-based encryption program. File Lock File Lock is a fantastic file encryption service that runs entirely on HTML5 technologies — you don’t even need to install a plugin for your browser! All you have to do is visit their website, choose the file...
Read the full article: 2 Ways To Encrypt Your Files From Your Browser
Do you want to send a file across the Internet to a friend or coworker, but don’t want the NSA to snoop on that file? You’ll want to encrypt that file, but in the quickest and easiest way possible. Thanks to various web technologies, you can now do this without even having to deal with a heavier desktop-based encryption program. File Lock File Lock is a fantastic file encryption service that runs entirely on HTML5 technologies — you don’t even need to install a plugin for your browser! All you have to do is visit their website, choose the file...
Read the full article: 2 Ways To Encrypt Your Files From Your Browser
Today in Tech News Digest, Amazon plans to deliver packages via aerial drones, a Facebook friends list hack is revealed, a vulnerability in Google Nexus handsets is discovered, Black Friday numbers are released, Steam introduces user reviews, and the Kindle Fire HDX is compared favorably to the iPad Air. Amazon Delivery Drones Amazon R&D is also working on buildings that you can drive to to pick up things in 10 minutes or less — Ashlee Vance (@valleyhack) December 2, 2013 When you order an item from Amazon in five years time you may get it delivered to your door within...
Read the full article: Amazon Delivery Drones, Facebook Hack, Kindle Fire Vs iPad Air [Tech News Digest]
Last week we asked you if your Facebook account ever got hacked. Whether it’s because you don’t use Facebook, never got hacked, or just don’t care, most of you couldn’t be persuaded to answer this poll, which left us with a small number of votes. Still, it’s surprising to see what percentage of Facebook account actually got hacked at least once. 136 readers voted, and revealed that 8% never owned a Facebook account, 23% got hacked at least once, and 69% never got hacked. Good for them! Full results and this week’s poll after the jump. Don’t forget to check...
Read the full article: Where Did You Shop This Black Friday? [MakeUseOf Poll]
Is your Internet connection unstable? Do you hate Facebook’s video interface? You don’t have to suffer. There are quick and easy ways to download videos from Facebook. You can then watch them on any interface you prefer, and most importantly, offline. Everyone knows how to download YouTube videos. You can do this easily whether you’re on Windows, on a Mac, or even if you want to download entire video playlists. But do you know how to download Facebook videos? By the end of this article, you will. Important note: Different Facebook videos have different privacy settings. You will only be...
Read the full article: 3 Ways To Download Videos From Facebook
A new U.S. specific web tool powered by Google works on one premise. It’s that public servants should be open to scrutiny and dialog with the people they serve. Map Your Representatives helps U.S. citizens with the first part of touching base with political representatives in their area. It answers the basic question – who represents me? Enter your address or ZIP code and Map Your Representatives will opens stylishly to display every relevant piece of social information it can find on the official. As the screenshot below shows you, it contains essentials like contact info and the official (or...
Read the full article: Use Map Your Representatives To Find Information On Your Legislators With A Click [U.S. Only]
John Q. Public has just finished importing the videos and pictures from the digital camera to his laptop but realizes that the media files are incorrectly time-stamped.
Maybe the date and time settings of his “point and shoot” camera were set incorrectly or maybe the digital camera was stamping the files with local time though the pictures were being shot in another country with a different time zone. He probably forgot to change the time stamp of the camera before going on vacation.
How does John change the data and time of his pictures?
Most image editing software, Picasa and iPhoto included, allow you corect the data and time of photographs imported from a digital camera or a smartphone. You can import your digital photos in the software and select the ones that need to be fixed.
In the case of Picasa, choose Tools -> Adjust Date & Time and select a new date for your photos. This will change the “Date Picture Taken” field in the EXIF data of you picturs. Similarly, iPhoto users can choose Photos -> Adjust Date & Time to set the selected photos to a particular date and time.
I however prefer a little-known command line utilitly called ExifTool for such operations since it is much more versatile. To get started, download the ExifTool executable and extract the zip file to your desktop. Now rename the exiftool(-k).exe utility to exiftool.exe and we are all set to adjust the date and time of our photographs.
Unlike the iPhoto or Picasa software that simply set the date and time of a photograph to another time stamp, Exif Tool can “shift” the data and time values associated with a picture. For instance, if your camera’s time was off by 2 hours 30 minutes at the time of capture, you can use ExifTool to shift the time stamp of all your pictures only by that “off” duration.
The sytax is:
exiftool.exe "-DateTimeOriginal+=Y:M:D h:m:s" filename.jpg
For instance, if wish to shift the time of photographs by 5 hours and 30 minutes, the command would be:
exiftool.exe "-DateTimeOriginal+=0:0:0 5:30:0" filename.jpg
And if you wish to perform a negative shift by 1 day, the command would be:
exiftool.exe "-DateTimeOriginal-=0:1:0 0:0:0" filename.jpg
Please refer to this document for the exact syntax and other examples.
Exif Tool is free and available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Remember when getting an email was exciting? Or when seeing a particular post on Facebook was an event? It feels so long ago, but it wasn’t. In the past few years the amount of information in our various inboxes has exploded, and we all feel overwhelmed as a result. And when I say “inboxes”, I’m not just talking about email. At this point you probably have several “inboxes” that consistently require your attention. There’s your email, but there’s also probably some combination of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and maybe an RSS reader demanding your attention. Really, any place where you don’t...
Read the full article: Use Your Computer, Don’t Let It Use You: Five “U”s For Reduced Stress Online
Microsoft’s OneNote is great for research, especially when used with Windows 8 and 8.1’s SkyDrive integration. And the popular note-taking app has now had a major update on the desktop OS that brings some cool new functions, including ‘Camera Scan’ for smart scanning and the ability to read and search scanned items. Camera Scan lets you capture important data like what’s written on the whiteboard in a meeting or that crucial document you don’t want to lose. Train your device’s camera at it, use OneNote’s Camera Scan and it will automatically crop, rotate, straighten, remove shadows and sharpen the image...
Read the full article: Microsoft Updates OneNote With OCR, Camera Scan, Share Charm
Tired of always being out of the loop? It’s amazing how quickly information can spread from person to person these days thanks to the Internet and social media. New ideas, websites, videos, and all manner of content can be seen by millions of people overnight, which mean that trends are being appearing and disappearing faster than ever before. Is it possible to keep up? The short answer is yes — with a catch. If you consume web media for hours per day, sure, it’s easy to stay on top of the latest trends and memes. But what if you don’t...
Read the full article: What’s Trending? Find Out With These Real-Time Data Websites
Responsive Google Maps – The maps automatically resize based on the screen size.
The new Google Maps now offer you can option to embed maps in your web pages. While you are on the Google Maps website, zoom-in to an area that you wish to embed, click the Gear icon in the lower left corner and choose the Embed Maps option from the menu.
This web page contains a sample map embedded using the default embed code provided by Google Maps. The embedded map is non-responsive. What it means is if you open the page on a device other than your desktop computer, the Google Map won’t fit the screen and you’ll have to scroll the page horizontally to see the complete map.
Here’s another web page that contains the same Google Map but now the map has been embedded responsively. Thus, if you resize the browser or view the page on a small device, the embedded map would adjust its size automatically based on your screen size.
This is the default embed code for the new Google Maps:
<!-- Height=450px; Width=600px -->
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d7098.94326104394!2d78.0430654485247!3d27.172909818538997!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e0!3m2!1sen!2s!4v1385710909804" width="600" height="450" frameborder="0" style="border:0"></iframe>
As specified in the height and width parameters of the embed code, the default height for medium embeds is 450px or 75% of the default width (600px).
If you wish to transform this static sized Google Map into one that is responsive, all you have to do is add a few CSS rules to your web page and wrap the embed IFRAME inside these rules.
The new embed code with responsive style will be something like this. You can change the value of padding-bottom (line #4) from 75% to something for a different aspect ratio.
<style>
.google-maps {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 75%; // This is the aspect ratio
height: 0;
overflow: hidden;
}
.google-maps iframe {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
left: 0;
width: 100% !important;
height: 100% !important;
}
</style>
<div class="google-maps">
<iframe src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?pb=!1m14!1m12!1m3!1d7098.94326104394!2d78.0430654485247!3d27.172909818538997!2m3!1f0!2f0!3f0!3m2!1i1024!2i768!4f13.1!5e0!3m2!1sen!2s!4v1385710909804" width="600" height="450" frameborder="0" style="border:0"></iframe>
</div>
A similar technique can be used to embed Instagram videos and photos responsively.
