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.

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

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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.

Top Results and Quick Answers in Google Inbox

I've always wondered why Gmail doesn't sort search results by relevance, just like Google Search. Gmail sorts results by date, so you can quickly find recent messages that match your query, and that's pretty useful, but sometimes you want to find an old email from a friend or a long-forgotten conversation about modern architecture.

Google Inbox has just added a "top results" section that shows the most relevant 5 results for your query. It's not perfect and it's easy to see why this doesn't replace the standard "sort by date": ranking email conversations is harder than ranking web pages. There are no links between messages, many messages are pretty short and are only important for a short while.

In addition to top results, Inbox now also shows quick answers extracted from your messages. "Now when you're searching for a frequent flyer number or shipping status, Inbox will show it at the top of search results – no more digging through individual emails to find what you're looking for."

YouTube Loop

Back in 2014, I found a way to loop YouTube videos using a feature of the HTML5 player. It looks like YouTube added "loop" as a standard feature. Just right click inside the HTML5 player and click "loop". This way, you can watch a video on repeat until you pause it or uncheck "loop" from the contextual menu.

It also works for embedded videos. Here's a short video you can use to test the loop feature:

Import Contacts in the New Google Contacts

When the latest version of Google Contacts launched last year, many features were missing. It looks like one of these features is back: you can now import contacts without switching to the old UI.

You can import contacts from Yahoo Mail, Outlook.com, AOL or from other email providers. If you want to import contacts from a CSV/vCard file, you'll still have to switch to the old interface.

Google uses a third-party service called ShuttleCloud for importing contacts. "To continue, you'll need to give ShuttleCloud temporary access to your contacts data, including names and email addresses," informs Google.

Another missing feature was restoring contacts. You can now "restore your contacts to any state within the past 30 days, recover deleted contacts, undo an import, or undo a merge."

Exporting contacts and printing contacts still require to go back to the old UI.

New UI for Google's Weather Card

Google redesigned the weather card to include more information and images. The new weather card is only available in the Google Search app for Android, at least for now. "When you search for 'weather' or ask Google, 'will it rain today?' in the Google app on your Android phone, you'll get a wealth of new information, including: hourly sky conditions and chance of rain, severe weather alerts, a detailed 10-day forecast, air quality, UV index, sunrise and sunset times, and more," informs Google.

Google's new UI has 3 tabs for "today", "tomorrow" and "10 days". There's also a "humidity, wind, sunrise, and more details" link at the bottom of the card which allows you to expand it. You can also tap anywhere inside the card.

Google added an option to add a location to the weather list. This way, you can search for "weather" and see a list of all the locations you've added and the corresponding weather information. The search bar is now optimized for finding locations, so it's easier and faster to switch to a different city.

The "today" tab now includes information about sunrise, sunset, solar noon, length of the day, remaining daylight, dawn, dusk, dew point, pressure, UV index and visibility.

The "10 day" shows weather forecast for today and the following 9 days. Tap a day to find more details, including hourly weather forecast, wind, humidity, UV index, sunrise and sunset.

How to Record your Desktop Screen with YouTube

Screencasting is simple. You download a software program, hit the record button and a video of your computer screen is created, ready for uploading to YouTube. There are a plethora of screencasting tools to choose from but did you know that you can also create screencast videos inside YouTube without requiring any desktop software? All you need is a YouTube account and a web browser.

Here’s a step by step guide on how you can make screencasts of your desktop windows with YouTube.

How to Create a Screencast with YouTube

Step 1: Sign-in to YouTube with your Google Account, click the Upload button in the upper left corner and choose Events under Live Streaming. If you never done this before, YouTube make require you to verify your phone number to enable streaming.

Step 2: You are on the Create Event page. Give your screencast video a title, set the privacy of the video to either Unlisted or Private and click the “Go Live Now” button.

Step 3: This will open the Hangouts on Air page. You can click the camera icon to turn off webcam recording. Similarly you can toggle the microphone icon if you do not wish to record audio.

Step 4: Now click the Screenshare button in the left toolbox and select a desktop window that you wish to record for your screencast. Remember that if you using multiple virtual desktops, it will only show program windows that are active on the current desktop.

Step 5: Click the Start Screenshare button to share your screen and then click Start Broadcast to start recording the screen. This is a private session so nobody can watch your broadcast while it is being recorded. When you are done with the recording, click the Stop Broadcast button and switch to the YouTube website.

That’s it. Go your YouTube video dashboard (http://youtube.com/my_videos) and you’ll see the new screencast video that you’ve just finished recording. You can download the video to your Google Drive or share it withe world.

The videos are recorded in 720p HD and this it would be a good idea to resize your desktop window to the 16:9 ratio before hitting the broadcast button.

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The story, How to Record your Desktop Screen with YouTube, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Screencasting, YouTube, Software.

How to Use Pluralsight Training for Free

Pluralsight is among the best places on the web to learn programming through videos. Whether you are a complete beginner or a pro looking to advance your coding skills to the next level, you’ll find a video course at Pluralsight that will meet your needs.

They have courses on practically all programming languages from JavaScript to PHP to Java to the trending technologies like AngularJS and React (see complete list). It is a subscription based service and you have shell out $30 per month to get access to their entire video training library.

Now here’s the interesting part. If you join the Microsoft Visual Studio program, which is also free, you automatically gain free membership to the entire PluralSight library for 6 months. No credit card or coupon codes required.

Here’s how you can activate your Pluralsight subscription in a minute:

1. Go to signup.live.com and create a new Microsoft Account. Skip this step if you already have one.
2. Go to my.visualstudio.com and sign-in with your Microsoft account.
3. This will open the Visual Studio Dev Essentials page. Here choose Pluralsight among the benefits (see screenshot) and click Get Code.
4. You’ll taken to the Pluralsight website to activate and redeem your 6-month subscription.

That’s it. Your subscription will be active for 6-months from the day you redeem the code. Pluralsight has iPhone and Android apps as well so you can learn on the go. And they have a desktop player that you can use to download videos and watch offline.

On a related note, you should definitely give Visual Studio Code a try. This is light-weight code editor from Microsoft that covers most programming languages and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. It feels snappy, supports themes & extensions and has most features you would look for in a code editor.

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The story, How to Use Pluralsight Training for Free, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Code, Internet.

Twitter Guide: How To Do Everything With Twitter

The first tweet was published almost 8 years ago and Twitter has come a long way since then. There’s a whole ecosystem of apps and services available now that allow us to use Twitter in more ways than ever before. This guide curates the best tools that will help you get the most out of Twitter.

1. Nuzzel – This works as an intelligent filter for Twitter and helps you discover the most popular news stories shared across your Twitter network. All signal, no noise.

2. Flipboard – Connect your Twitter account to Flipboard and it will create a beautiful magazine for all your Twitter feeds that you can flip through on the web (example), mobile and Windows 10 devices.

3. LifeOnTwitter – Get interesting statistics and facts about your Twitter account (example).

4. TallTweets – It lets you send tweets of any length by slicing your long tweet into multiple 140-character tweets (sample) and sending them in sequence.

5. IFTTT / Zapier – Whether you want to tweet by email, cross-post tweets to Facebook, or need a way to easily upload your Instagram pictures as native photos on Twitter, these tools can easily automate such tedious tasks.

6. Spruce / Canva / Adobe Post – Pick a photo, write some text and watch as these tools transform your text into a typographical masterpiece.

7. Storify – A web-based app that helps you find and curate tweets around topics and turns them into stories. You can also pull in YouTube videos, Facebook posts and other content from the social web in your stories.

8. Twitter Curator – This is like Storify for Google Docs (demo). You can search, filter and collect tweets right inside a Google Document.

9. Buffer – The best app for scheduling tweets. They offer useful analytics and the same tweet can be simultneously published to Facebook and LinkedIn as well.

10. Twitter Archiver – Specify a search phrase or an #hashtag and the archiver will pull in all matching tweets into a Google Sheet where they’ll live forever.

11. Twitter RSS – Easily create RSS feeds for Twitter search results and subscribe to them inside Feedly or any other feed reader.

12. CrowdFire – A handy tool to keep track of your unfollowers, send auto DMs to new followers, find dormant users in your Twitter timeline and more.

13. Egg Followers – Find all your Twitter followers that are still using the default egg as their profile picture. They are likely spam accounts.

14. TwitterCounter – See how your Twitter circle has grown over time. Some of this data is now available inside Twitter Analytics.

15. TweepsMap – It creates a Google Map of your followers so you know where they are coming from.

16. Daily140 – Get a daily email with most recent follows and favorites of any 5 Twitter users of your choice.

17. Tweriod – The tool analyzes the time when your followers are most active on Twitter. You can time your tweets accordingly for maximum reach.

18. Sleeping Time – Know the time period when a particular Twitter user is least active online.

19. TwitterFontana / VisibleTweets – Show tweets for any search term in real-time  on a big display. Useful for events.

20. PayWithTweet – Tweets are a form of social currency and some websites will happily give away design goodies, PDF ebooks, coupon codes, etc. in return for tweets.

21. ClickToTweet – The site will transform your text, say a quote, into a tweetable link. Useful for putting links in email newsleeters.

22. TheHash – It aggregates the most popular tweets around trending hashtags for the day and puts them in a beautiful visual design.

23. Direct – It brings a messenger-style interface to Twitter allowing you to chat with anyone through DMs.

24. Twitter Merge – Send personalized Tweets or DM multiple peope in one go from a Google Spreadsheet.

25. Twipho – A search engine for Twiter but limited to tweets with images.

26. Twitter Bots – Learn to write your own Twitter bots that can auto-reply, retweet or like tweets.

27. T4BP – Short for Twitter For Busy People, the site lets you quickly see updates from all your Twitter friends in single page.

28. Out Of Office – Setup an out-of-office reply bot similar to the one you have in your email program.

29. Web TweetDeck – The only reliable Twitter client that works in the browser without having to install any app. Includes tweet scheduling as well.

30. Instacurate / Vellum – These will turn your Twitter timeline into a visual Pinterest style news site.

31. Fake Tweets – With a little CSS, you can change the text of any tweet and create fake screenshots similar to the ones you regularly see on satire websites.

Bonus Tip: If you tweet labnol.org, Twitter will convert your text into a link pointing to the actual website. In order to prevent Twitter from doing so, insert a zero-width space after the dot. See how.

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The story, Twitter Guide: How To Do Everything With Twitter, was originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal on 19/01/2016 under Twitter, Internet.

New File Picker in Google Inbox

Google Inbox has a new attachment picker. When you compose a new message and click the paperclip icon, Google now shows a list of recently received attachments, a list of recently sent attachments and the latest photos uploaded to Google Photos. Click "show more" to see the rest of the attachments and photos. You can also select files from your computer. Unfortunately, there's no Google Drive integration yet.

"Inbox by Gmail on the web now makes it easier to share memories with instant access to recent photos and attachments," informs Google.

{ Thanks, Jonah Langlieb. }

Google Play Music Family Plan

Google Play Music started to offer a new family plan: $14.99/month for up to 6 family members, just like Apple Music. You and 5 other family members can subscribe to Google Play Music All Access and keep your own playlists, radio stations, ratings and recommendations. The new family plans are available in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France and Germany, while also requiring regular Google accounts (no Google Apps, for now). You can only sign up from the Google Play Music app for Android, but everything else works for all the platforms supported by Google Play Music.

Google says you can "share a payment method on Google Play so your family can purchase apps, movies, books and music." It looks like Google will add a family sharing feature for Google Play, so that purchases are shared between family members, just like in iOS.

Save Google's Image Search Results

If you find beautiful images using Google Image Search's mobile site, you can save them and organize them using a new Google service. Just tap the star icon next to a search result and the image is saved to your account. Go to google.com/save to see all the images and add tags or notes (the link only works from mobile Chrome and Safari).

"When using your phone or tablet's web browser, you can easily save images you find in Google search results as links. You can see your saved images, which are similar to bookmarks, when you're signed in to your Google Account. You can return to your saved images at any time and add tags to organize them," informs Google.

Reminders in Google Calendar

Google Calendar's apps for Android and iOS now let you add reminders, just like you can do using Google Keep, Google Search or Google Inbox. This feature is rolling out this week if you have the latest version of the Google Calendar's mobile app. Until now, you could only see your reminders in Google Calendar.

"You might already create calendar entries to remind you to call the doctor or pick up groceries on the way home. But while those entries come and go, Reminders stick with you over time so you can track them until they are actually done. If a Reminder isn't completed, it will appear at the top of your Calendar the next day. And the next. When you do finally call the doctor or pick up those necessities, just swipe the Reminder away ... and you're onto the next to-do," informs Google.

Calendar events are different from reminders, but you can now manage them from the same app. Google promises to bring this feature to the Google Calendar web app in the near future.

All Tab in Google Search

Google has a new name for the "web" tab from search results pages. It's now called "all", which better reflects that Google no longer shows only web pages, but also quick answers, facts, images, videos, news, maps, apps, books and more. That's the whole idea behind Universal Search, which was launched back in 2007.

Travel Guide Snippets in Knowledge Graph Cards

Google's Knowledge Graph cards include a lot of information from Wikipedia. Google usually shows a snippet from a Wikipedia article and links to the article. I was surprised to notice that cards for countries and big cities from all over the world no longer quote Wikipedia and now include detailed information from travel guides.

Here's an example for [France]: "France, in Western Europe, encompasses medieval and port cities, tranquil villages, mountains and Mediterranean beaches. Paris, its capital, is known worldwide for its couture fashion houses, classical art museums including the Louvre and monuments like the Eiffel Tower. The country is also renowned for its sophisticated cuisine and its wines. Lascaux's ancient cave drawings, Lyon's Roman theater and the immense Palace of Versailles are testaments to its long history."

The snippet from the corresponding Wikipedia article is less poetic: "France, officially the French Republic, is a sovereign state comprising territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European part of France, called Metropolitan France, extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, and from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean. France spans 640,679 square kilometres (247,368 sq mi) and has a total population of 67 million. It is a unitary semi-presidential republic with the capital in Paris, the country's largest city and main cultural and commercial centre."