Must-have Extensions for Google Chrome

Here’s a comprehensive list of the best extensions for Google Chrome that will help you do more and also enhance your web browsing experience.

The Best Google Chrome extensions

1. Vimium — Power users can browse the web using keyboard shortcuts. No mouse required.


2. Buffer — Share links to multiple social websites with a go.


3. PushBullet — Send web links, text notes and even push files from computer to your phone.


4. Clip Better — Don’t send raw links over email, send previews that suggest what a link is all about.


5. Streamus — A YouTube music play for Chrome that also includes a radio.


6. Mighty Text — Send and receive SMS text messages from your desktop computer.


7. Snappy Snippets — Easily extract CSS and HTML from a web page and send it to CodePen or jsFiddle.


8. Project Naptha — Copy text from any image with a right-click. It’s like an OCR for Chrome.


9. Hover Reader — Read an article simply by hovering over a link.


10. Bubble Cursor — Easily click links on web pages or type text in input boxes.


11. Dewey — Improved bookmarks manager for Chrome with website thumbnails and instant search.


12. dotEPUB — Convert web pages and documents to EPUB ebooks that you can read offline on your Kindle or iPad.


13. YouTube Feed — Get notified when new videos are available in your YouTube subscriptions list.


14. Boomerang — You can write an email in Gmail now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time.


15. Hola — Unblock websites and access content, including videos, that aren’t available in your country.


16. YT Options — Improves your YouTube experience and hides all the annoying parts.


17. TextDown — A well designed Markdown text editor for Chrome.


18. WriteBox — A minimal text editor for Chrome that also sync with Dropbox and Google Drive.


19. Font Previewer — Preview and test any of the Google Web fonts on your website.


20. SpeakIt — Select some text on a web page and the add-on will read it for you.


21. Remote Desktop — Access other computers or allow another user to access your computer securely over the Internet.


22. Extensions Manager — Easily manage your installed extensions, applications and themes from the Chrome toolbar.


23. StayFocusd — Lets you restrict the amount of time you spend on time-wasting websites.


24. Feeder — A mini RSS reader that sites in the toolbar of your Chrome.


25. Page Monitor — Runs in the background and monitor web pages for changes.


26. OneTab — Make your Chrome run faster by suspending tabs and restore them all with a click.


27. Clipular — Screen capture anything you see on the web with a click.


28. Time Warp — Focus on your work and avoid the distracting websites.


29. MakeGIF — This is the easiest way to save a YouTub video as a GIF file.


30. CleanPrint — Print web pages without the clutter or save them as PDFs


31. Quick Source — View the source code of any web page, deobfuscated and beautified.


32. SpellBook — It collects all your bookmarklets and puts them in the contextual menu.


33. GIF Scrubber — This adds movie player like controls to animated GIFs on the web.


34. Push to Kindle — Delivers any web content to your Kindle or the Kindle Reading Apps.


35. KeyRocket — Learn and master the various keyboard shortcuts available in Gmail.


36. Hover Zoom — Hover your mouse over an image to see the full-sized version in an overlay window.


37. Input Tools — Write text in your own language using virtual keyboards and transliteration.


38. ShortenMe — This lets you to easily shorten links with goo.gl and generate QR codes.


39. Chime — Unified desktop notifications for Gmail and all your social networks.


40. NiftySplit — Split Chrome in two windows. Click a link in the left window and it opens in the right one.


41. WhatFont — Identify the name of the fonts used in a web page with a click.


42. StyleBot — You can manipulate the appearance of websites and the changes are permanently preserved.


43. Panic Button — Quickly hide all the open tabs and replace them with a work related website.


44. iReader — Read long web pages like a novel in a clutter-free environment.


45. Image Properties — View camera details, GPS location and other information about any photograph.


46. Tab Outliner — See all your open tabs and Chrome windows in a vertical hierarchical tree.


47. RSS Subscription — Subscribe to RSS feeds in your favorite news reader with a click.


48. URL Expander — The add-on will auto-expand all short URLs found on a web page.


49. Text Mode — Browse the web in black and white in pure text without images and other media.


50. Twipster — It makes the Twitter website clean and more readable.


51. Better History — A better history viewer for your Chrome.


52. History Timeline — A better way to visualize your browsing history in Chrome with pictures.


53. Clearly — Read web pages in a distraction free environment.


54. Stylish — Completely change the look of your favorite websites.


55. PageRank — Find the Google PageRank and other SEO related information of a page.


56. Fatkum — Download images in bulk from any website including Flickr and Google Images.


57. Google Dictionary — View word meanings without leaving the current page.


58. in10search — Search for content across all open tabs in Chrome.


59. Page Archiver — Save the entire web page to your desktop including the images, CSS and JavaScript.


60. Holmes — Search your bookmarks from the omni bar of Chrome.


61. Nimbus Screenshot — Capture and annotate web pages inside your Chrome browser.


62. AutoPagerize — Easily read paginated web pages without clicking.


63. Readability — Send web pages to your Kindle for reading later in a clutter free environment.


64. Save to Google Drive — Save web files to your Google Drive with a click.


65. Looper — Watch your favorite YouTube videos in a continuous loop.


66. Personal Blocklist — Block one or more useless websites from appearing in your Google search results.


67. Swift Preview — Don’t open a new tab. Preview links before clicking in the same window.


68. FastBrowz — Preview links on Reddit and Hacker news without leaving the front page.


69. Share Extensions — Generate and share a list of extensions installed in your Chrome browser.


70. Chrome to Mobile — Push web pages from the desktop to your mobile or tablet for offline reading.


71. Dead Mouse — You can open links on a web page with your keyboard without ever touching the mouse.


72. Google Site Search — Quickly search pages on the website that you are currently browsing.


73. YouTube Ratings — See the proportion of likes and dislikes of any video on the YouTube website.


74. Similar Pages — Find more websites that are similar to the one you are currently looking at.


75. Search by Image — Find other images on the web that are similar to one picture.


76. Source Locator — Locate the folder where the source code of any Chrome add-on is unpacked.


77. YouTube Thumbs — See a short preview of the YouTube video without even opening the watch page.


78. Send from Gmail — Send the current web page by Gmail with a click. Works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.


79. Chrome Access — The add-on provides quick access all the ‘about:’ and ‘chrome://’ internal pages of Chrome.


80. Disconnect Me — Prevent online advertisers and search engines from tracking you on the web.


81. Web Timer — Keep track of how you spend your time on the Internet.


82. Strict Workflow — Block time-wasting websites temporarily and focus on your work.


83. Window Resizer — Automatically resize your Chrome browser window to any screen resolution.

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This story, Must-have Extensions for Google Chrome, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 09/05/2014 under Google Chrome, Software

Clean Up your Whiteboard Pictures by Email

Your mobile phone has an excellent camera but photos of the whiteboard aren’t coming out as good and clear as you would like them to be. Maybe there’s poor lighting in the conference room? Maybe your camera’s settings aren’t perfect for capturing whiteboard photos?

One little trick that will vastly improve the quality of your whiteboard pictures is available inside the manual settings of your cameraphone. Go to your camera’s manual settings, choose EV (Exposure Value) and add 1 or 2 “stops” (usually indicated by +2) before clicking the Capture button.

Then there’s a shell script that brightens and cleans up your whiteboard images using the popular ImageMagick library. It runs from the command line and all it needs is ImageMagick, a free image editing software that is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

If you find it a hassle to remember commands, there’s an even easier way. Capture the whiteboard scribbles with your mobile camera and send the picture as an email attachment to the following email address.

please@make.unwhiteboard.com

Wait for a minute or two and you’ll get a prettier version of the whiteboard image, clean and legible and more optimized for printing. Here’s an example.

Before

After

Internally, the Unwhiteboard service uses the same ImageMagick command to clean up your Whiteboard captures but on their own server so you don’t have to install anything on your computer.

Here are some more useful email addresses.

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This story, Clean Up your Whiteboard Pictures by Email, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 05/05/2014 under Email, Image Editing, Internet

Microsoft Patches XP, Vine YouTube, Mute Twitter, Life Simulator [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Microsoft patches Windows XP, Vine does a YouTube, Twitter experiments with muting, a Google Glass teardown, Amazon smartphone leaks, a real-life Dropbox, and the creator of Minecraft’s new game. Microsoft Backtracks On XP Support “DON’T USE WINDOWS XP WE WILL NEVER PATCH IT AGAIN EXCEPT WHEN WE TOTALLY PATCH IT AGAIN.” You blinked. http://t.co/moSpDAxJT2 — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 2, 2014 Microsoft has released an emergency patch fixing the vulnerability recently discovered in all versions of Internet Explorer. As well as the expected patches for Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1, Microsoft has issued...

Read the full article: Microsoft Patches XP, Vine YouTube, Mute Twitter, Life Simulator [Tech News Digest]

Microsoft Patches XP, Vine YouTube, Mute Twitter, Life Simulator [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Microsoft patches Windows XP, Vine does a YouTube, Twitter experiments with muting, a Google Glass teardown, Amazon smartphone leaks, a real-life Dropbox, and the creator of Minecraft’s new game. Microsoft Backtracks On XP Support “DON’T USE WINDOWS XP WE WILL NEVER PATCH IT AGAIN EXCEPT WHEN WE TOTALLY PATCH IT AGAIN.” You blinked. http://t.co/moSpDAxJT2 — Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) May 2, 2014 Microsoft has released an emergency patch fixing the vulnerability recently discovered in all versions of Internet Explorer. As well as the expected patches for Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8.1, Microsoft has issued...

Read the full article: Microsoft Patches XP, Vine YouTube, Mute Twitter, Life Simulator [Tech News Digest]

Lucidpress: The Free Online InDesign Alternative For Your Creative Needs

Adobe InDesign is a fantastic desktop publishing program, but is still prohibitively expensive for many who only need a casual page layout app. The monthly subscription model of the Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) is still not quite right for casual projects and minimal budgets. So, what is a casual designer to use as an InDesign replacement? After a bit of research, I decided to try Lucidpress. One of Lucidpress’s main advantages is that it’s a free InDesign alternative available online. For all the new Chromebook users out there who need a page layout tool, this is a major selling point...

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4 Hidden Benefits Of Learning A Foreign Language If You Are A Geek

When you’re an Anglophone geek, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that you don’t have to learn a foreign language. After all, nearly every piece of software comes with an English localization. Most programming languages use English words and phrases. Indeed, English is overwhelmingly the language of the Internet. And yet, there’s never been a better reason and a better time to learn a foreign language. We’ve talked about ways in which you can learn a language over the Internet, but we’ve not really talked about the benefits learning a new language can deliver to a geek. Indeed, there...

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Build Your Own Weather Dashboard In This Google Spreadsheet Master Class

“Computer! Show me all current weather conditions within 300 miles of my current location” “Yes Captain” “Now, show me the humidity levels for those locations, charted by longitude and latitude on a map” “Yes Captain” Would you like to turn your Google Drive account into an intelligent weather analysis system, and live out this Star Trek fantasy? Okay, you might not be able to turn Google Spreadsheets into an artificially intelligent computer system that will respond to your voice commands, but in this article I’ll show you how you can import weather data from the Internet and have your own...

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Get Tech Skills You Need At These Top 7 Online Course Sites

The 21st Century workplace isn’t any different from the amphitheaters of ancient Rome. You are fighting someone brandishing a tech skill in demand, or running to barely stay ahead of the corporate lion going cutting edge. There is no war here – it’s a battle every day. The great thing is that you will not end up as vulture feed. The Roman arena was a prison. The 21st Century workplace sets you free with multiple gates of learning. Online learning is a disruptive technology whose time has come. Even though, there are genuine criticisms against the effectiveness of massive online...

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Looking For A Markdown Editor For Linux? Try These 3 Solid Options

If you’re looking for a dependable Markdown editor for Linux, we have three great options for you to consider. Markdown is a excellent format in which to write all things Web. With easy-to-use syntax, it bridges the gap between plain text and HTML smoothly. While Windows and Mac users, and even Android users, have many Markdown editors to choose from, Linux users will find fewer options. Having said that, there are a few decent options for us Linux users; you’ll find a few of them below. But first things first: if you’re not sure why and how you should be...

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Do You Care What Happens To Google+? [We Ask You]

Google+ hasn’t exactly set the world alight. It’s done OK, building a sizable userbase thanks to Google’s insistence we all have a Google+ account – whether we want one or not. But it’s hardly Facebook or Twitter in terms of engagement. Which leads us to ponder whether anyone actually cares about Google+ and its ultimate fate. We suspect no one does, and that assumption, and the arguments for and against it, form the basis for this week’s We Ask You discussion. Google+, Google-, Google+-? We want to know, Do You Care What Happens To Google+? The future of Google+ is...

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Education For All: Volunteer In Coursera’s Global Translator Community

Coursera is calling on volunteers. The MOOC platform has launched The Global Translator Community (GTC) program that will attempt to add translated subtitles to the 600 plus video courses on the site. Coursera observes that only 40% of “Courserians” live in English-speaking countries. Translated video courses will immediately open up educational opportunities to a wider swathe of people around the world. Once the program kicks off, translated subtitles will be displayed for all students through a “closed captioning” tool at the bottom of the video player. According to Coursera, the demand for translated subtitles for the video courses is a...

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5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do With The WordPress Config File

At the heart of every WordPress install is the wp-config.php file, a file so sacred and shrouded in mystery that every WordPress user knows it should never be touched. Or should it? In fact, there’s a lot of lesser known useful hacks that can be without damaging WordPress in any way, and it’s about time you took your WordPress skills up a notch. Read on for 5 of my favourite wp-config tricks. This article is strictly intended for self-hosted WordPress.org sites, not those hosted on WordPress.com (what’s the difference?). Before you start, know that you can potentially stop WordPress from...

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4 Rules For Working With Tech Support When Your Site Goes Down

How do you host your website? You might choose to host it on the bare-metal of a dedicated server, or on a cost-effective VPS. If you’re anything like me, you probably choose to host your site on a managed, shared-hosting package, mostly out of pure laziness. After all, who wants to do server management in their spare time? The other day, my website was automatically upgraded to the latest and greatest WordPress; version 3.9. Not long after, everything broke. Suddenly, I was unable to create new blog posts. I couldn’t log in. I couldn’t see my Jetpack statistics. Nothing worked....

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What You Can Do With Gists on Github?

Github is the popular website among software developers for sharing code. The site hosts over 12 million open-source projects — including games, books and even fonts — making Github the largest code repository on the Internet.

Github offers another useful service called Gist that developers often use to dump their code snippets but Gists aren’t just for geeks and coders — they offer something for everybody. If you have ever heard of web apps like Pastebin or Pastie, Gist are similar but more polished, they are free of advertising and loaded with more features.

Gist – They aren’t just for Geeks!

Here are some areas where you can utilize the Gist service. And you don’t have to be a geek for this.

1. Write Text Anonymously

You don’t have to create an account at Github to use Gists. Just go to gist.github.com, write any block of text in the space provided and create a Gist. You can choose to have a secret Gist that will not be visible to search engines but only to those who know the URL of that secret Gist.

2. Track Changes like a Wiki

When you edit the content of a Gist that has already been published, the previous versions of the Gist are also preserved. You can hit the Revisions tab to track edits made over time and there’s a built-in diff engine that will visually highlight the changes between any two versions of a gist. This can also be used for comparing text files.

3. Publish Gists in Rich Text

While gists only accept plain text, you can use the Markdown format to publish your text in rich HTML format. You can add lists, images (hosted externally) and even Tables that are not supported in the original Markdown specification. When you are done writing the text in Markdown, remember to save the file with a .md extension.

4. Gist as a Writing Platform

While there exist plenty of writing engines — from Blogger to Medium to Tumblr — you can also Github’s Gist service to quickly publish your writings on the web. Create a Gist either in plain text or markdown format and then use roughdraft.io to publish that Gist as a standalone web page. It’s like integrating Readability with your Gists. And you can use emoji (smileys) too!

5. Host Single Page Websites on Gist

Bl.ocks is one of the most interesting applications built for Gists. You can write your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code in plain text, save the Gist as index.html and then use bl.ocks.org to serve the rendered version of that HTML web page as it should appear in the browser. For instance, here’s a live version of an HTML file that is hosted on gist.github.com.

There are bandwidth constraints obviously but bl.ock.org is still an excellent tool for hosting your HTML through Gists. The other alternative is Google Drive.

6. Maintain a Task List

You can use Gists to keep track of pending tasks (see example). The tasks are written in a special syntax in plain text but they are rendered as a list of check boxes.

- [x] Pick the flowers
- [ ] Call John 9303032332
- [x] Cancel cable subscription
- [ ] Book the flight tickets

You can check or uncheck the items and the source text will update automatically. If your Gist is public, anyone can see your to-do lists but only the gist owner can change the status of individual tasks.

7. Gist as a Web Clipper

The GistBox add-on for Google Chrome lets you save text snippets from web pages as public or private gists. You can even add labels, or #hashtags, to your gists making discovery easier.

8. Embed Gists in Web Pages

You can embed any Gist in your web pages with a line of JavaScript code. The embedded Gists maintain all the formatting and syntax highlighting and visitors to your website can easily clone (or fork) your Gist into their own Github accounts. There’s also a plugin and shortcode for embedding Gists in WordPress blogs.

<script src="http://ift.tt/1o3bYDJ;

9. Measure the Traffic

You can use Google Analytics to measure the traffic to your Gists. Since Github does not allow JavaScript code to run inside plain text Gists, we can use the GA Beacon to log visits in real-time to Gists.

Add this line to your Gists, save in Markdown format and it will add a transparent tracking image to your Gists.

![Analytics](http://ift.tt/1pOi6Ew)

10. Manage Gists from the Desktop

Gisto is free desktop application that lets you manage your Gists outside the browser. You can search Gists, edit the content of gists, view revisions over time and also share Gists. The app is available for Mac OSX, Windows and Linux. The other alternative is GistBox which is a web app.

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This story, What You Can Do With Gists on Github?, was originally published at Digital Inspiration on 30/04/2014 under Internet

Twitter Is Flatlining, Firefox 29 Is Radical, MacBook Air Is Cheaper [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Twitter flatlines, Firefox updates, MacBook Air cheapens, Xbox One lands, Udacity expands, and Vsauce measures. Twitter Is Flatlining It sucks that twitter has ruined every experience that one could possibly ever have huh — matt (@mattbuchanan) April 23, 2014 Twitter has reported its financial results for Q1 2014. The figures can be spun a number of ways depending on your point of view, but the ultimate truth lurking behind them all is that Twitter is flatlining to an alarming degree. The financials aren’t too bad. Twitter brought in revenues of $250 million during the last...

Read the full article: Twitter Is Flatlining, Firefox 29 Is Radical, MacBook Air Is Cheaper [Tech News Digest]

Watching TV: Anytime, Anywhere, On Every Device [We Ask You Results]

Watching TV is a completely different experience now than it was in the last golden age of television. The days when families would huddle around a square box spitting out a handful of channels full of scheduled content are long gone. Sadly. The range of options available for couch potatoes keen on watching television is vast. As we found out when we centered our We Ask You discussion on all things related to the television viewing habits of the MakeUseOf readership. TV Here, TV There, TV Everywhere We asked you, How Do You Watch TV? There was a healthy debate...

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Get Paid To Search With The Bing Rewards Program

If you don’t use Bing, you may want to reconsider. A while ago, we compared Bing Images vs. Google Images as well as Bing Search vs. Google Search. Back then we declared Google as the winner but the past few years have seen gradual improvements to Bing, making it an actual contender as a search engine. But here’s the kicker: Bing pays you to search. It’s called the Bing Rewards Program. I’m fully aware that this isn’t an altruistic act by Microsoft. Yes, you can see it as a bribe to switch away from Google. Yes, there may or may...

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Google Self-Driving Cars, HP Android Laptop, Oculus Rift Lag [Tech News Digest]

Today in Tech News Digest, Google self-driving cars navigate cities, Microsoft owns Nokia, HP teases an Android laptop, a Secret expansion, BuzzFeed wants $1 billion, Joss Whedon gets In Your Eyes, and Oculus Rift demonstrates living with lag. Google Updates Us On Self-Driving Cars Google has offered an update on where its epic effort to make self-driving cars a reality stands at the moment. The big challenge being mastered right now is driving through city streets, with mastery of freeway driving having been achieved. Chris Urmston, the director of the project, claims Google’s self-driving cars have now completed more than...

Read the full article: Google Self-Driving Cars, HP Android Laptop, Oculus Rift Lag [Tech News Digest]

Relive History With 80,000+ British Pathé Historical Newsreels [Stuff to Watch]

Pathé News, known these days as British Pathé, has been responsible for recording some of the most important events in history – from global warfare to World Cup finals, and now much of the footage is available to watch on YouTube. With over 80,000 films to peruse, you would need years to get through them all – and there’s not a lot of order to the collection either. Regardless, if you’re looking for footage of well-documented cultural movements, news events and days that shook the world then British Pathé on YouTube is a great place to start. Queen Victoria’s Funeral...

Read the full article: Relive History With 80,000+ British Pathé Historical Newsreels [Stuff to Watch]

No Blog, No Problem — 3 Handy Apps To Help You Quickly Publish A Post

If a blog feels like too much work, feel free to cut it out of the equation. You can publish posts without one. Writer or not, you might wish to put your thoughts in writing when the mood strikes you. If you want to start a blog we have plenty of information to help you with that, including this definitive guide to WordPress and Joel’s article on easy-to-use blogging tools. But what if having to set up and maintain a blog to send out the occasional post does not appeal to you? Maybe you just want to contribute a few...

Read the full article: No Blog, No Problem — 3 Handy Apps To Help You Quickly Publish A Post