Can I Upgrade my Computer to Windows 10 for Free?

Windows 10, the latest version of Windows, will be released on 29^th July. The new Windows OS has received rave reviews from people who are currently testing it as part of the Windows Insider program but there has been some confusion around the upgrade path. Will you be eligible to download a free upgrade of Windows 10 or will you have to pay for the license?

Who Can Download Windows 10 for Free?

This quick flowchart breaks it down in simple English.

If you have a computer that is running a genuine copy of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you will get a free upgrade license of Windows 10. If you are running a pirated copy of Windows, or if you have Windows Vista or XP installed on the machine, you’ll buy a new license for Windows 10 and perform a clean install.

The Windows 10 Home license will be $119.99 while the Windows 10 Pro version would cost $199.99.

If you would like to try Windows 10 but without affecting your existing Windows installation, you can join the Windows Insider program, download the Windows 10 ISO and install it as a Virtual Machine using VirtualBox. These preview builds will however expire after some time and the fresh builds are automatically installed as and when they become available.

You can follow the official Windows blog to learn more about the upcoming Windows 10 release or join the Windows Insider program to download and use the Windows 10 beta before it is generally available.

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The story, Can I Upgrade my Computer to Windows 10 for Free?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/06/2015 under Windows 10, Software.

Mobile Google Search Tests Oversized Header

I'm not sure if this is a bug or a new Google experiment, but I've noticed a different mobile search interface that uses more space for the header. There's a Google logo, a search box and a list of specialized search engines below the search box. It's based on the experimental interface I've mentioned in a previous post.

If you enable the search tools and restrict results to a certain date range, the new header uses even more screen real estate.

For some reason, this experimental interface is only used when searching from Google's homepage. Chrome's search box sent me to the compact UI.

Google Promotes Privacy Checkup

There's a new promotional message that's displayed when you sign in to a Google account. Google encourages you to use the Privacy Checkup feature from the new My Account page and "take control of your Google privacy settings".

The page lets you "review and adjust what data Google uses to personalize your experience, and update what information you share with friends or make public."

You can choose what Google+ profile information you share with others, manage what you share on YouTube, personalize your Google experience by enabling or disabling features like Web & App Activity, Location History, YouTube Search and Watch History. You can also manage ad settings and opt out of ads based on your interests.

All of these features were previously available, but this is a simplified step-by-step guide, just like the Security Checkup. Google wants to make sure you are "always in control of your data and information".

Google Apps Menu

When you mouse over your name in Google's navigation bar, there's a tooltip that says: "Looking for Google+? Click the Google Apps icon to the right."

Mouse over the grid icon and there's a new tooltip: "Google Apps".

This used to be called Google App Launcher, since it was similar to Chrome's App Launcher. Google's help center articles still use this name: "To switch between Google products, click the App launcher icon and select the one you'd like to use."

Google Apps is the name of a suite of productivity tools for business, education, nonprofit organizations and more, so it's a bit confusing to use the same name for the launcher feature.

How to Transcribe Video Files to Text with YouTube

A college professor is looking to transcribe some audio files as text and publish them online. He wrote – “We have some old lectures recorded on reel-to-reel tapes. We have digitized the audio lectures using Audacity and would now like to transcribe the audio and publish the lectures as text. What is the best way to proceed?”

A quick Google search will return a list of paid transcription services where you can hire people who will accurately transcribe and convert the audio content of your digital files into text. However, if you are looking for an inexpensive and automated option, YouTube can help.

When you upload a video file to YouTube, it will automatically generate subtitles or closed captions for that video. Google uses speech recognition to transform the speech portion of your video into closed captions that are displayed in the video player when the viewer hits the CC button (see screenshot).

If a YouTube video has the “CC” button, you can download the transcription as text.

If your video has decent audio quality and there not too many people speaking in the video at the same time, YouTube will automatically make a text transcript that may not be as accurate as human transcription but would do the job. The transcript is hidden inside obfuscated JavaScript but there’s a way to download it as plain text file.

Download Audio Transcriptions from YouTube

Here’s a quick guide on how to transcribe audio or video files to text with the help of YouTube.

1. Go to youtube.com/upload and upload your video file. If you have an MP3 audio file, you may use a tool like Windows Movie Maker, iMovie on Mac or FFMpeg to convert the audio into a video file before uploading to YouTube.
2. Wait for YouTube to completely process the video. The machine transcriptions may not immediately become available after uploading the video.
3. Open the YouTube video page in Chrome and look for the CC button in the player. If it exists, the transcribed audio can be downloaded as text.
4. Press F12 on Windows, or Option+Cmd+J on Mac, to open the JavaScript console inside Chrome Developer tools and paste this code:

if(yt.config_.TTS_URL.length) window.location.href=yt.config_.TTS_URL+"&kind=asr&fmt=srv1&lang=en"

It will open the transcribed text of the uploaded video in the current browser tab as shown in this short video. Save the file with a .html extension and double-click to view the transcription in plain text.

The same trick can help you download the closed captions of any video on YouTube even if you are not the uploader. And you can replace “en” in the URL with “fr” or “es” to download the transcriptions in another language.

Download the audio transcription from YouTube as text

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The story, How to Transcribe Video Files to Text with YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 23/06/2015 under YouTube, Internet.

Google Notifications Settings

Google's notifications box from the navigation bar has a new settings button. For now, it shows a single service (Google+) and it lets you enable or disable notifications from Google+. If you disable Google+ notifications, you'll actually disable all notifications.

Here's a screenshot that shows the only option that's currently available: "allow notifications here from Google+". For the first time since Google+ was launched, you can now disable Google+ notifications from the navigation bar.

Maybe in the future Google will show notifications from other Google services: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, YouTube. That's why the title is now "Google Notifications" instead of "Google+ Notifications".

{ Thanks, Mukil Elango. }

How to Let Others Upload Files to your Dropbox Account

A class teacher needs her students to submit homework at the end of the week. A company wants designers to send the mockups and design drafts for review. A news organization is asking public to upload documents to their website. An event organizer is requesting attendees to send any photos or videos that they may have taken at the event.

What do you think is the easiest solution for all these use cases? Yes, e-mail. People can send you files by email and you can then use the Save Attachments script to automatically download these files to your computer. The big problem is that you cannot receive big files via email and second, it does take some work to organize stuff that arrives in email.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could create a public folder on the Internet where anyone could go and simply upload the files instead of sending them to you as file attachments. Students can upload assignments, designers can upload mockups and your friends can upload photographs.

Let Anyone Upload Files to your Dropbox

This is the essence of Dropbox Requests. The requests service would let anyone –  your clients, work colleagues or even anonymous strangers – directly upload files to a designated folder in your Dropbox account easily and quickly.

They do not need a Dropbox account and you’ll get an instant email notification as soon as new files are added to your Dropbox. And you can accept files as big as 2 GB provided you’ve enough free space in your Dropbox.

Such a feature is missing in Google Drive but you can build a form that would let anyone upload files to your Drive with the help of Google Scripts.

Your Dropbox Request link is “unlisted” meaning anyone can access your file upload form if they know the URL. Also, when uploading files, the uploader would have to write their name and email address in the upload form but these are not verified so the upload will happen even if they enter fake information.

Dropbox shares no other details of the file uploader with the folder owner though they should be recording your IP address in their own database. Thus, Dropbox Request may not be an ideal solution if you are operating a Wikileaks like website where you would not like people to leave a digital trail. Here are some more Dropbox tips & tricks.

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The story, How to Let Others Upload Files to your Dropbox Account, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 21/06/2015 under Dropbox, Internet.

How to Enable Facial Recognition in your Google Photos

Google Photos, like Facebook or Apple Photos, has built-in facial recognition and the software can automatically organize your photos based on people’s faces. While you cannot assign names to the recognized faces, at least yet, the software algorithms can smartly identify and group photos of people to help you visually find photos quickly.

Facial recognition is available inside Android, iPhone, iPad and the web version of Google Photos but if you are not seeing it in your account yet, it is probably because you are accessing Photos from outside the United States.

Also see: Google Photos – Tips & Tricks

A footnote on the Google Photos website says that “[Facial recognition] feature isn’t available in all countries,” probably due to privacy laws, but there’s a simple workaround that will help you bring face detection in your Google Photos, no matter where you are.

1. Go to your Android phone settings, select “Apps”, then select “Photos” under the “Downloaded” section and click the “Clear Data” button to reset your Google Photos app.
2. Go to the Google Play store and download TunnelBear or Hola or any of your favorite VPN apps.
3. Open the VPN app and connect. It will essentially trick Photos into thinking that you are connecting from US, a country that is supported by Google Photos for facial recognition.
4. Open the Google Photos app, scroll past the wizard screen and then under Settings, enable the option that says “Group Similar Faces – Auto Group photos by matching faces.”

That’s it.

Disable, or even uninstall, the VPN app, launch Google Photos again and tap the blue search button. You should see a list of faces that Google Photos was able to detect from your uploaded photos. And the feature will automatically become available on photos.google.com as well.

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The story, How to Enable Facial Recognition in your Google Photos, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 20/06/2015 under Android, Photos, Internet.

A YouTube Survey

Google's services show various surveys, but they're usually discreet. This time, YouTube placed a satisfaction survey at the top of the homepage, above the list of videos from the "what to watch" section. Here's the only question: "How would you rate the picture quality of professional videos (e.g. music videos or TV clips) on YouTube?"

Google Photos – The Good Parts

When Google launched Gmail in 2004, it bundled 40x more free storage space than competing web mail services. It seemed to solve all storage woes and there was not even a “delete” button in Gmail because, with a gigabyte available, why would anyone ever delete their emails. They’ve adopted a similar approach with Google Photos but gone a step further.

Google Photos offers unlimited online storage space for your digital photos and videos. The original images are compressed after uploading but the difference is barely noticeable, at least on the computer screen.

I started dumping all my pictures to Google Photos, the day it launched, and couldn’t be happier. The initial purpose was online backup but now Google Photos has become “the” place where I go to explore my photos. The files do not consume a byte of local storage space and yet the entire collection is always available on every device that I own.

Here are essential things that you should know about Google Photos and some tips to help get the most out of this amazing photo backup service.

Upload your pictures to Google Photos

Google Photos has desktop uploaders for both Windows PCs and Mac OS X. Alternatively, you can drag folders from the desktop to photos.google.com and they’ll be uploaded instantly. Android, iPhone and iPad users can install the Google Photos app and their mobile photo will be backed up automatically.

There’s no support for Windows Phone. Linux users can upload photos from a web browser but it is not a very convenient thing when you have too many folders to upload. And if you are already storing photos in places like iCloud, OneDrive or Dropbox, you’ll have to download them locally first for sending to Google Photos. There’s no cloud-to-cloud transfer option.

Organize your Google Photos

Google Photos will arrange your uploaded pictures by location and by date taken automatically. It can also recognize the subject of photos using machine algorithms so if you search for “food” or “dinner”, you will likely see all your family dinner photos. You can find “selfies” too. The results aren’t always accurate but a useful option nonetheless.

Facial recognition, the most useful feature of Picasa, is also available in Google Photos but not outside the United States. There’s no way to search for photos by date or tags either.

If you have painstakingly organized your photo in albums manually, you’ll be disappointed to know that Google Photos will ignore these albums and instead dump all the photos in one big pool. You can create photo albums inside Google Photos but it will not maintain the local album structure during upload.

Duplicate Files in Google Photos

Google Photos can smartly detect duplicate photos and will skip uploading them if a copy has been uploaded previously. The file names of your photos can be different and they can reside in different folders of your hard disk but the service will still recognize the duplicates and remove them from the upload queue.

There are two kinds of duplicates – exact duplicates and near duplicates. If you take a file and slightly crop it or change the EXIF data, it is a near duplicate of the original file. Google Photos will however treat this is a different photo and upload it as well along with the original image.

If you have too many “near duplicates” on your computer, use a desktop tool like Picasa to remove the duplicates before adding them to the upload queue.

Deleting Files in Google Photos

You can delete a file from Google Photos and it will go to the trash. It sits there for 60 days and is then permanently removed so you have enough opportunity to restore your accidental deletes.

Here’s an important detail you should know though.

Let’s say you have a file holiday.jpg in a local Google Photos folder. If you delete this file from the Google Photos app and also empty your Google Photos’ recycle bin, the local file will get re-uploaded to Google Photos. This will happen on mobile as well. If you delete an item from Photos, the item may get re-uploaded from the phone’s gallery.

Thus, always remove files from the local folder as well after the upload it complete else they’ll be re-uploaded if you ever remove the corresponding files from Google Photos.

Editing & Sharing Google Photos

You can select one or more photos, hit the Share button and Google Photos will create an semi-private album with your selected photos. If you choose to share on WhatsApp or other messaging apps, Google Photos will download and send the actual photos and not just share the link to the album.

Google Photos include a suite of image editing tools that let you perform basic edits and you can also apply Instagram-like filters to your images. I was impressed with the photo editing capabilities of Google+ earlier and the same set of tools are now available in Photos. You can even produce animated GIFs and photo slideshows and send them to YouTube straight from the app.

When you share a photo or album in Google Photos via a link, anyone with that link can view your shared photos. There’s no way to limit sharing to specific email addresses as we have in Google Drive.

Google Photos – Tips & Tricks

• The Google Photos uploader is a one-way client and, unlike Dropbox, it will not sync your photos on multiple computers or mobile devices. You can however use Google Takeout to download all your Google Photos on another computer.
• In Google Drive, go to settings and turn on the option that says “Automatically put your Google Photos into a folder in My Drive.” You can now see all your uploaded photos inside Drive and you can even sync your Google Photos with other computers just like any other Google Drive folder.
• There’s no Google Photos API available but if you want to programmatically access Google Photos, the good old Picasa Web API may do the trick.
• The Google Photos app is not Chromecast compatible but you can cast the entire phone screen to see your photo collection on the TV.
• The desktop uploader for Google Photos may not upload screenshot images.
• If you not sure if the desktop uploader is working, go to this secret link and confirm whether files are getting added or not.
• Google Photos are not available inside Gmail but if you have linked your Photos to Google Drive, you can easily attach any of your Google Photos in email messages.
• Go to the YouTube website, click the upload button and you’ll see a new option that says “Import from Google Photos.” You can pull any video from Photos and send it to YouTube.

The hard disks and CDs, where you are currently storing those precious memories, will go defunct in a few years. With Google Photos now available, there’s no reason not to upload your pictures to the cloud because all you need is a decent internet connection.

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The story, Google Photos – The Good Parts, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/06/2015 under Photos, Internet.

New Interface for Google Cache

Google Cache pages have an updated header and now allow you to check the source code of the cached page.

The message is the same. Here's an example: "This is Google's cache of http://ift.tt/1ApNg8t. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on Jun 17, 2015 19:01:59 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime."

Google lets you switch between:

* the "full version", which is displayed by default
* the "text-only version", which doesn't load images, scripts and other resources
* the page source - a new feature.

Full version:

Text-only version:

Source code:

Google+ Link in Google Translate

While other Google services remove integration with Google+, Google Translate added a prominent link to its own Google+ page. The Google+ icon is placed next to the Phrasebook icon, at the top of of the page. It will be interesting to see how long it will last.

{ Thanks, Alireza Eskandarpour Shoferi. }

Google Mobile Search Tests More Dividing Lines

Google tests a slightly different mobile search interface that adds dividing lines between search results URLs and snippets, while decreasing font size for titles. Another change is that the names of the specialized search engines are written in uppercase letters (WEB, NEWS, IMAGES, SHOPPING, etc.)

Google already used dividing lines that separate search results, so the new lines are a bit confusing. Some users might associate a snippet with the URL of the next search results.

Here's the regular mobile search UI: