It’s a sinking feeling because there’re so many confidential documents on the computer and since most of your trusted colleagues have also left for the day, there’s no point calling them for help.

So what do you do? Drive back to Office? Well that’s not required - just take out your cell phone or switch on the laptop at home, send an email (or an SMS or a tweet) and that will instantly lock your Office workstation. And if you share the same computer with multiple people, you can use another email command to remotely log off or even shut down the computer from anywhere in the world.

There’s no magic here, it’s the power of TweetMyPC utility that lets you remote control your computer from a mobile phone or any other Internet connected computer.

It works like this. You first install the free TweetMyPC utility on any Windows PC and associate your Twitter account. The app will silently monitor your Twitter stream every minute for any desktop commands and if it finds one, will act upon it immediately. The initial version of TweetMyPC was limited to basic shutdown and restart commands, however the current v2 has a far more robust set of commands, enabling a far more useful way of getting your PC to carry out certain tasks especially when you’re AFK (Away From Keyboard).

Before we get started, it may be a good thing if you can set up a new twitter account for remote controlling your desktop and also protect the status updates of this account to ensure better security.

Protecting the account means that you prevent other users from reading your tweets which in this case are email commands that you sending to the computer. To protect your Twitter profile, log in to Twitter with the credentials you want to use, click Settings and check the box next to "Protect my Updates".

Let’s get started. Install the TweetMyPC utility of your computer and associate your Twitter and Gmail account with the application. It will use Twitter to receive remote commands (like shutdown, log-off, lock workstation, etc) from while the email account will be used for send your information (e.g., what process are currently running on your computer).

How to Send Commands to the Remote Computer

Now that your basic configuration is done, it’s time to set up a posting method. You can use email, SMS, IM, web or any of the Twitter clients to send commands to the remote computer.

By Email: Associate you Twitter account with Posterous (auto-post) and all email messages sent to twitter@posterous.com will therefore become commands for the remote computer. (Also see: Post to Twitter via Email)

By SMS: If you live in US, UK, Canada, India, Germany, Sweden or New Zeleand, you can send associate Twitter with your mobile phone (see list of numbers) and then control your remote computer via SMS Text Messages.

By IM: Add the Twitter bot - twitter@twitter.com - to your list of Google Talk buddies and you can then send commands via instant message.

By Web:If you are on vacation but have access to an internet connected laptop, just log into the Twitter website and issue commands (e.g., shutdown or logoff) just as another tweet.

Download Files, Capture Remote Screenshots & more..

While the TweetMyPC is pretty good for shutting down a remote computer, it lets you do some more awesome stuff as well.

For instance, you need to download an unfinished presentation from the office computer so that you can work on it at home. Or you want to download a trial copy of Windows 7 on the Office computer while you are at home.

Here’s a partial list of commands that you can use to remote control the PC - they’re case-insensitive and, as discussed above, you can send them to Twitter via email, SMS, IM or the web.

Screenshot : This is one of the most useful command I’ve come across after the shutdown command. Want to know what’s happening within the confines of your PC when you’re not around? Just tweet screenshot and TweetMyPC will take a screenshot of your desktop and post it to the web (see example).

ShutDown, LogOff, Reboot, Lock : The function of these useful commands is pretty obvious from their names.

Standby, Hibernate : Don’t want to shutdown the remote PC? Save power by entering standby mode with this command. Or hibernate your PC with a tweet, thereby saving even more power.

Download <url> : You can download any file from the Internet on to the remote computer using the download command. For instance, a command like download http://bit.ly/tCJ9Y will download the CIA Handbook so you have the document ready when you resume work the next day.

GetFile <filepath> : The Download command was for downloading files from the Internet onto the remote computer. However, if you like to transfer a file from the remote computer to your current computer, use the GetFile command. It takes the full page of the file that you want to download and will send that you as an email attachment. If you don’t know the file page, use the command GetFileList <drivename> to get a list of file folders on that drive.

GetProcessList : This is like a remote task manager. You’ll get a list of programs that are currently running on the remote computer along with their process IDs. Send another command kill <process id> to terminate any program that you think is suspicious or not required.

Conclusion:

TweetMyPC is a must-have utility and you never know when you may need it. And if you have been trying to stay away from Twitter all this time, the app gives you a big reason to at least create one protected account on Twitter.

That said, there’s scope for improvement. For instance, the app will wait for a minute to check for new messages in your Twitter stream so it’s not "instant". The developers can actually increase that limit because the Twitter API now allows upto 100 checks per hour.

And since the app is dependent on Twitter and Gmail, it will not work during those rare fail-whale moments.

Related: Twitter Guide: How to Do Everything with Twitter

How to Remote Control your Windows PC with Email or SMS - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Well, here’s a simple trick.

Open the web page that you want to capture, go to the address bar of the browser and type "aviary.com/" just before the http:// part of the URL.

For instance, if your web address is something like http://labnol.org, the new URL will become aviary.com/http://labnol.org - hit Enter and there you have an editable screenshot image of that page.

Or add this bookmarklet to the bookmarks bar and you can even save yourself from typing aviary.com every time you want to capture a screenshot.

You can save the image to the desktop or further add annotation using the Type Tool, freehand brushes, arrows and other tools available in the Aviary editor. It can’t get easier than this.

And it even works with the Flash videos of YouTube.

Another web services that allows screen capture of web pages in the browser is Kwout.com though it won’t do full pages. [via RWW]

Related: Capture Website Screenshots [with desktop tools]

Taking Full Screenshots of Web Pages Was Never This Easy! - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Why do friends get ignored on Twitter?

You are comfortable reading news in the river style but it present one major problem. Say you have two friends on Twitter - Mr. Active who sends a new tweet every 5 minutes and Mr. Busy who rarely tweets. Now in the current format, you are most likely to miss all updates of Mr. Busy because his tweets will continuously get pushed down by Mr. Active.

So you have no intention to ignore Mr. Busy but he is still getting ignored because your Twitter App is using the River format that naturally favors Mr. Active.

Twitter updates without the River

There are however some good solutions to this practical problem:

Twitter 100 - This app creates some sort of a collage of all the people you follow on Twitter (see example) - you can read their most recent updates in one go and the page will auto-refresh every 3 minutes.

Twitter For Busy People - The Twitter 100 mashup discussed above work great for people who follow only a few dozen people on Twitter but if you have hundreds of contacts on Twitter, check out Twitter for Busy People (see example).

This mashup displays a series of thumbnails of your Twitter friends in order of their most recent updates. You can then hover the mouse over any of these thumbnail images to read the most recent status update from that person.

Or click the "more" link to see the last 25 updates from the friend without closing that pop-up. Pretty cool. Thanks @ev.

For more tips & tricks, check out The Twitter Guide.

Stop Ignoring your Less Active Twitter Friends - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

The homepage of bing.com features a new background image everyday - you can use the arrow buttons in the lower right corner to view images of the last 7 days or check this archive that includes every single image that has been showcased on Bing since its public launch on June 1.

While a majority of these photographs have been licensed from stock photography websites like Getty Images or Fotostock, Microsoft has also featured images (e.g., Patagonia) that were shot by their employees.

And now here’s an opportunity to get one of your own images featured on the official Bing homepage for a 24 hour period.

To participate, upload a photograph to this Facebook page - the guidelines suggest that photograph should be in horizontal mode and the composition should be such that main area of interest in the picture should not fall behind the Bing search box (or the non-grey portion of the above image).

The winning photo will be selected on August 3rd by a combination of user ratings on Facebook and evaluation by the Bing homepage editorial team. Also check this list of photos that have recently been submitted for the Bing contest.

Hide Bing Images:

If you like to prevent Bing from displaying the background image, just add rb=0 to the bing.com so that your new URL looks something like this - bing.com/?rb=0. Change that to value to 1 and the background will reappear.

Want to See a Photo You’ve Taken on the Bing Homepage? - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

You can also search through this huge collection of images using the Insert -> Clip Art command available inside all Microsoft Office programs. These images can then be downloaded to the local hard-drive so you can quickly use them in other documents as well without having to search the Office Online site again.

The Microsoft gallery of images, though huge, looks miniscule when compared with Google Images which has a few billion images in its index (warning - not all images found via Google Image Search can be used in documents due to copyright issues).

However, if you limit your search to images that are either in the Public Domain or available under some sort of Creative Commons License, Google Images (or for that matter, any image search engine including Flickr) is a good place to find photographs and clip-arts for inserting in documents.

Offisync, a free plug-in that lets you open Google Documents in Microsoft Office, can now be used for importing images from Google Image Search into your Office files as well.

The image search feature of Offisync is pretty similar to the built-in Clip Art gallery search. Upon installation, Offisync will add a new Google Search option to your Office Toolbar - you can directly search for pictures and then insert any one of them into document or presentation that you are currently working on.

The plug-in won’t add any attribution related information but it shows the URL of the page containing the original image so you copy-paste that information into the document manually.

While Offisync officially works only with Google Image Search, here’s a simple tip that will help you search other photo websites via Offisync as well -  use the site: operator with your search query.

For instance, if you want to limit your search to Flickr, use site:flickr.com <query> and it will only display pictures that are on Flickr. Use site:gov with the query to search for US Government photos that normally don’t carry any restrictions.

Add Website Screenshots in Documents

Other than inserting images, you may also use the Offisync plug-in to add website screenshots into your documents or spreadsheets.

Use the web search feature to invoke the built-in web browser, type the full URL of the website in the Address bar (or use Google Search to find that website) and Clip. Drag the marquee around the area that you want to capture and hit the Insert button.

Related: How to Edit Clip Art in Office

Import Google Images into your Office Documents - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

It’s such a joyous moment and blogging / twittering will stay light for a few days.

Thanks for all your good wishes.

A New Member In Our Family - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

The problem becomes more serious if you using a service like Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) to host your images because Amazon charges a fee for every byte of data downloaded from their servers. Thus you’ll also have to pay for all sites that are consuming your bandwidth by hotlinking to your S3 hosted content.

Who is hotlinking to your Amazon S3 Images?

If you like to know about other sites or web pages that are linking your Amazon S3 files, there are two options:

Option #1 (Simple): Link your Amazon S3 (or CloudFront) account with S3Stat and turn on server logging for your S3 buckets - you can do this from the S3Stat web dashboard itself.

The service will regularly parse your Amazon S3 server access logs and will then prepare a list of referrer URLs that are accessing your S3 content (see example). If you spot a web URL that doesn’t belong to you, chances are that the site is hotlinking to one of your S3 files.

Option #2 (Free): The S3Stat service discussed above is pretty easy to use but costs about $5 per month.

If you are looking for a free alternative to monitor your S3 files, here’s a tip - download any of the free Amazon S3 clients (I recommend CloudBerry Explorer) and enable logging for buckets whose usage you want to track. Wait for some time for Amazon to create logs of your S3 files and then download all these log files to a local folder on your hard-drive (again using any of the S3 clients).

Merge the log files into one text file and import it into a spreadsheet program like Excel. Now convert the data into columns using "space" as the delimiter. If everything goes fine, the 17th column (or Q) will contain the HTTP Referrer headers and these are often the URLs of the linking or embedding page.

The following screencast should make the process more clear ^#.

How to Prevent Sites from Hotlinking

Unlike the Apache server where you can prevent other sites from hotlinking to your images through some .htaccess rules, such a feature in not available in S3.

Therefore the best way to deal with hotlinking on S3 is to send an email to the owner of the other site or simply move your images to another location and update the hyperlinks in your own web pages.

The other approach that you may also want to explore useses Signed URLs (see tip #2) - these are temporary links that automatically expire after a given time (similar to rapidshare). It may not be the right thing to do for static images but if you are hosting downloadable files like videos, ebooks or MP3s, time limited URLs could be a good option on S3.

Related: More Amazon S3 Tutorials

Find Sites That Are Hotlinking to your Amazon S3 Files - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Animoto is an easy tool for creating impressive videos out of your boring digital photos in minutes. Just upload your pictures to the Animoto website (or pull them directly from Flickr or Picasa), select a background music to play with your video slideshow, add some text (optional) and you’re done.

Check these pages on YouTube and Twitter to see some more video clips that have been created using Animoto.com.

The basic version of Animoto is free but it limits you to 30 second video clips that aren’t downloadable though you can upload them to YouTube. You can however sign-up for Animoto using this special link and it will give you the option to create one full length video on Animoto for free.

A full length video can be as long as the duration of the song and you can download the video as well though it’s not in HD format.

Animoto Tips for Better Video

While Animoto makes is super easy for your to create professional looking videos without any preparation, a little bit of planning can make your slideshows look even better. Here are some tips from Animoto:

1. When uploading photos to Animoto, always pick photos that have a landscape orientation as portrait photos can sometimes format oddly during the video render process.

2. Animoto will automatically determine the duration of each picture in the video slideshow but if there’re pictures that you really want to emphasize in the video, select the images in the video editor and use the spotlight button.

3. When adding text to your video, always make sure that their pictures on either side of the text slide else your text will lack any moving video in the background.

4. Your choice of music determines the transition speed. If you select a slow classical song, your music video will have slow transitions whereas if you select rock, the transitions will happen fast - go for the latter if you are looking to create MTV style video clips.

5. Animoto consumes around 15-20 images for their 30 second shorts. If you upload more images, they are likely to be discarded in the final video so pick the best shots before starting the render process. For full-length videos, you an upload upto 300 shots but the number of pictures used would really depend on the choice of your music - slow music means less pictures.

6. While most people use Animoto for creating fast slideshows, you can adjust the video speed to 1/2x for a more traditional slideshow.

7. If you want to brand your Animoto slideshows, make sure that the last image in the slideshow is not a photograph but an image of your logo.

Tips for Producing Better Video Slideshows with Animoto - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

The video is embedded on the Mozilla homepage using the HTML 5 video tag and should therefore play in Firefox 3.5 or Google Chrome even without the Flash Player.

Kevin Purdy too has a great rundown of all the new tools & features of Firefox 3.5 including the very useful option to clean Internet history selectively.

All the New Features of Firefox 3.5 - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Great if you replied yes but if you aren’t in the habit of shutting down the computer at the end of the work day, you aren’t just wasting money (through electricity bills) but the laziness on your part is making an impact on the environment as well. From a 2009 report:

If 100 users remembered to turn off their computers at the end of their work day, this could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an amount equivalent to taking 2.14 cars off the road in a month.

If all of the PCs in the world are powered down for just one night, this alone would save enough energy to light up the Empire State Building for more than 30 years.

If the numbers ring a bell, you may want to try this desktop widget that quietly sits in the system tray and monitors your system usage like how frequently you turn off the computer and how long does the computer stay idle (powered on but unused) after working hours.

The widget then tries to estimate the amount of energy you may have saved by turning off the computer. It also includes a handy timer that will remind you to power off the computer one hour before the end of the work day.

Now the more interesting part. The widget also uploads your usage on a community website where everyone can see how frequently other widget users in different parts of the world are turning off their computer. It’s a social site so can you also see stats of your friends who too may have installed the widget.

The HP "Power to Change" widget in an Adobe AIR application so it should work just fine on Windows, Mac and Linux machines. The widget will not count time that a computer in standby or hibernate mode as idle time.

Another eco-friendly tip: Use Less Paper when Printing

Desktop Widget Reminds You to Shutdown the Computer - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

For instance, I can go to backtweets.com and it will instantly show me a list of twitter messages (and their total count) that mention any of my blog articles.

Which articles from your site are getting popular on Twitter?

The web interface of backtweets is pretty awesome for tracking popularity of web pages on Twitter one-by-one but imagine if you could use the same service to measure popularity of dozens of web pages or even your entire site in one go?

Well, here’s a Google Docs spreadsheet [*] that does exactly the same thing. It consists of two sheets - one for tracking RSS feeds and other for tracking multiple URLs.

[*] If you have trouble viewing the sheet, please open this read-only HTML version of the Google sheet. And here’s a video demo:

The text in the video will be more readable if you watch it in full-screen mode.

Here’s how you get started - just type the URL of any RSS feed in cell B1 and Google Docs will automatically compute the tweet count of all articles that are syndicated via that feed.

If you like to measure the same data but for your entire site, open the sheet titled "Web Pages" and copy-paste the list of all your URLs in column A. The tweet count will be reflected in the adjacent column and you can then sort by this column to find web pages that are most popular on Twitter.

And this computation happens in real-time so the Twitter numbers on your Google Docs will change if more people tweet that URL or if you some new content gets added to your RSS feed.

The Technical Details

You don’t need to read this for using the spreadsheet but if you are really curious to know how Google Docs could get the Twitter numbers for your blog feed, here’s what happens behind the scenes.

Cell B1 is the place where you type the web URL of an RSS feed.

Column A grabs the title of the 15 latest stories from the RSS feed using this formula:

=importfeed(B1, "Items Title" , , 15)

Column B displays the URL of these 15 stories using this formula:

=importfeed(B1, "Items URL" , , 15)

Now that we have the URL of your pages, we can use the BackTweets API to calculate the number of incoming links on Twitter for those web pages. BackTweets sends the data in an XML format so we use another Google Docs formula to extract the relevant information.

=importxml(http://backtweets.com/search.xml?key=XYZ&q="
          &B3, "//totalresults")

You need to replace the string XYZ with your own unique API key and that can be requested at this page. It’s free for non-commercial use and you can make 1000 requests per day.

See the tutorial on Tracking Web Pages with Google Docs for a more detailed explanation of the ImportXML function.

Find Your Most Popular Web Pages on Twitter with Google Docs - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

That’s because Google now allows all video publishers to export their own video clips out of YouTube in MPEG-4 (MP4) format - you can directly play these downloaded in iPod or other video players without conversion.

To download any of your own videos from YouTube, go to My Videos -> Uploaded Videos and look for the "Download as MP4" button next to your video clips as shown in the above screenshot.

This is useful for offline backup of your video or even if you are planning to copy (or even move) videos from YouTube to another video hosting service but don’t have access to the source video files.

The only downside is that these video clips have a 480×270 resolution so they won’t match the quality of your original 720p HD videos.

Related tutorial: Embed YouTube in PowerPoint Slides

Now Download Your YouTube Videos Legally - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Not sure if anyone is willing to go that far but a student in UK has actually converted 0.01% of the Wikipedia encyclopedia into a printed book. See some pictures below:

Also see: How to Print Wikipedia Articles

This Wikipedia book has some 5,000 pages and it’s a compilation of 400+ featured articles all picked from Wikipedia. And, as you can easily make out from the photographs, the book is huge - it’s about 1ft 7in. high or just as tall as a 30" widescreen monitor.

The more interesting part is that, Rob Matthews, who came up with this idea of printing Wikipedia, also has plans to sell this book according to Telegraph.  

Related: Guide to Useful Wikipedia Tools

Wikipedia as a Printed Book - Seriously! - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

The traditional banner ads and even contextual advertising (like AdSense) is not really working on social news sites so web companies like Facebook and Digg are trying more innovative ways to get the advertiser’s message across to their users without actually annoying them.

For instance, Digg introduced a new advertising platform early this month that gives users more control over advertisements that get displayed on the Digg website. Digg users can vote or even bury an ad just like they interact with other non-sponsored stories on Digg.

The more an ad is Dugg, the less the advertiser will have to pay. Conversely the more an ad is buried, the more the advertiser is charged, pricing it out of the system.

Taking a cue from Digg, Google is introducing a slightly similar form of advertising in Orkut where users will have the option to trash ads that they dislike.

Called Orkut Promote, this is sort of a self-advertising platform where advertisers as well as regular Orkut users can promote their content including photos, videos or text content among the Orkut community. Google will charge advertisers for promotion while regular Orkut members won’t pay have to pay a fee for using Orkut promote.

It works like this. Say I have a video on YouTube that I want to spread virally on Orkut. I create a new promotion in my Orkut account that embeds the YouTube video. As soon as I publish this promotion, all my other friends on Orkut can see it and if they like it enough, they can further promote it to their own circle of friends. Or they may just decide to trash it.

 
Who is using Orkut - Comscore

To get started, watch out for a link on you Orkut profile that says " Promote on Orkut" - the service isn’t live for everyone yet.

Orkut Promote will be another tab to your Orkut profile page and Google will use the tab to display promotions from both advertisers and other Orkut users (i.e., your friends). You can trash or re-promote sponsored promotions in the same way as your friends’ promotions.

Taking a Cue from Digg, Google Introduces Ads in Orkut That You Can Trash - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

Before getting into the actual process, let’s look at a couple of real-world situations that explain why you may want to turn your home computer into a web server.

Situation #1. Say you have music MP3s, documents and other important files on the hard drive of your home computer. If you turn this home computer into a web server, you will be able to access all these files from office or any other Internet connected machine including your mobile phone.

Situation #2. You have some personal photographs that you want to share with other family members. You can either upload these pictures online to a site like Flickr or better still, just convert the computer into a web server. Now you can connect the camera to the computer, transfer the digital pictures to some designated folder and they’ll instantly become available to your friends and family anywhere in the world.

Situation #3. You want to host a website on the internet but the web hosting jargon like FTP, DNS, etc. is way too complex for you. The workaround therefore is that you setup a web server on your home computer (it’s easy) and then host a website in seconds without spending a single penny on external web hosting services.

Now if any of the above reasons look convincing enough, here’s how you can convert your Windows, Mac or Linux PC into a web server in less than two minutes - no technical knowledge required.

Go to labs.opera.com, download the Opera Unite software and install it. Congratulations, you are now running a web server on your machine and just need another minute to configure local file folders that you want to share with others over the internet.

Here’s an illustrated screenshot of the configuration panel - nothing technical here again.

Start the Opera Web browser (yes, that’s also you web server now) and enable the Opera Unite service from the lower left corner. Now double click the File Sharing link and select the folder whose content you want to share on the web. Any file or folder inside this folder can now be accessed over the internet - you can either use a public URL or specify a password for private sharing.

The following screencast video has more detailed instructions on how to get started with Opera Unite or you may refer to the User Guide if you get stuck somewhere.

Opera Unite looks pretty useful but there are other services around that can also do pretty similar stuff. For instance, both PurpleNova and Dekoh Dekstop enable users share content on the Internet directly from the hard drive without having to upload it anywhere.

Update: It’s important to note that your computer must be in running state and also connected to the Internet for others to download files and web pages since Opera Unite streams content directly from your machine - it doesn’t upload or caches anything to its own servers. Give it a shot. [flickr]

Turn Your Home Computer into a Web Server in 2 Minutes - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

If you said yes to any of the above questions, read this.

Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator here, has just launched a new device called Net PC, which as the name suggests, is a low cost computer designed specifically for cloud computing. The device is powered by Windows XP (not Linux as you would expect) and costs INR 5,000 (or $100) in India.

To get started, you just have to plug in the USB modem or the broadband Ethernet cable into the Net PC and you’re ready to go. The device weighs a mere 500 grams and is small enough (11.5cm x 11.5cm x 3.5cm) to fit in one of your trouser pockets.

When you think cloud computing, the first thing that strikes your mind is Google Docs but surprisingly, Airtel’s cloud computer comes pre-loaded with a rental copy of Microsoft Office so you can work on those documents and presentations even while you are not connected to the Internet.

Airtel Net PC is a subscription based device so you also need to pay a monthly rent for using the software in addition to your broadband bill.

To give you an example, the minimum plan costs somewhere around Rs 700 per month where Rs 200 is the software rent while you pay the rest for DSL broadband. This plan will get you 3GB of data transfer (at 256 KB/s), 10 GB of online storage space and a copy of Microsoft Office Standard that also includes Microsoft Outlook for your email needs. You can also transfer data out the Net PC box using any of the available USB ports.

The downside is that you can don’t have the privilege to install new software on the device so can’t use[*] Firefox or Google Chrome for browsing as XP only comes with IE. And I am not too sure if the Net PC is locked to Airtel or will it work with broadband services from other providers like Reliance or BSNL.

Download this PDF to know more about Net PC or you can walk into any of the Airtel or NEXT stores in NCR Region (Gurgaon, Delhi or Noida) for a demo.

[*] Though you can’t install new software, I guess it should still be possible to run software that don’t require installation like the portable Google Browser.

Airtel Net PC is a Low Cost Computer for Working in the Cloud - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

You are more likely to open the clock (or “Adjust date and time” module) in your Windows desktop and will then navigate to the date for which you have to calculate the day of the week.

The first step is fine but here’s a tip from PC Mag that will help you jump to specific dates in the Windows Calendar more quickly.

First click the name of the month to view all months of the current year, then click the year to view the last ten years and finally click it one more time to view the entire decades. This 30 second screencast video will walk you through all the steps.

While this trick can help you quickly calculate the day of the week for a given date, the limitation is that it only works with dates that are between 1930 and 2069.

Windows Tip: Find the Day of the Week for any Given Date Very Quickly - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

For instance, you can search for TIME magazine on Google News Timeline and it will display a list of all issues of the magazine in chronological order (arranged by date). Click any of the TIME covers to open the corresponding issue on the TIME website.

For researching current events, you can select News from the drop-down, type in some topic (e.g. india-pakistan) and hit go to read what the mainstream media has published about the topics in all these years.

Use Google News Timeline as an RSS Reader

The Google News Timeline format is pretty handy for navigating blog archives but the problem is that it is a search based service.

For instance, you have to search for something like "labnol" or "digital inspiration" to add this blog to the Google timeline but if the blog’s RSS feed is not available in Google’s index or if Google has trouble locating a feed using your search terms, you can’t read that blog or website inside Google News timeline.

But there’s a very easy workaround to this problem that should help you add just about any website (that has a feed) to the Google News Timeline.

The trick is that instead of searching for the blog name in Google News Timeline, you just specify the RSS feed address (as shown below) and the corresponding content will automatically appear in the Google News graphical timeline.

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.<RSS_Feed_URL>

For instance, if I were to add my blog directly into the Google timeline, the URL would be something like this:

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.http://feeds.labnol.org/labnol

To read multiple blogs using the Google Timeline in one go, you can simple separate the different feed address using %2C as shown below:

http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/?subs=blog.<Feed-A>%2Cblog.<Feed-B>%2Cblog.<Feed-C>

To catch this in action, click here. What you then see on your screen is a mixture of five different feeds (Digg, Twitter, Techmeme, Hacker News, DI) - some people will definitely find this timeline interface more convenient especially when following a small number of blogs.

Also see: Read Blogs inside Google Docs

How to Use Google News Timeline as an RSS Reader - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

You probably upload them to an online photo sharing site (like Flickr or Picasa Web Gallery) first and then copy-paste the web address of the uploaded image into your Twitter client. Or you prefer to use Twitter specific services like Twitpic that automatically send a "tweet" on your behalf as soon as the image is uploaded.

If that’s your workflow, consider this. You can now integrate your Flickr account with Twitter such that the combination works just like TwitPic. You upload a picture to your Flickr photo gallery and it will instantly show up in your Twitter stream as in this example.

How to Connect Twitter & Flickr

It’s a simple process. Open this link on Flickr.com and click "Head over to Twitter now" for giving permission to Flickr to post messages on to your Twitter stream. It uses OAuth so you don’t have to share your Twitter password anywhere.

Once your Twitter account is linked with Flickr, you’ll get a slightly complex email address. Now if you like to Twitter a photograph (or a screenshot image), simply compose a new message in your email client, attach the relevant image and send this email to the address provided by Flickr.

The subject line of your email message becomes the title of the photograph on Flickr while the email body becomes the description.

This method of posting images is actually very handy for mobile phone users. Just capture a picture with the built-in camera, send it to Flickr via email and it shows up in your Twitter network as well.

Can I uses Facebook or my own Blog with Flickr

In the above scenario, we used Flickr as the main storage point. However, if you are more active on Facebook or feel like using your own blog to host images, you can do that easily via the awesome Posterous service.

Just associate Facebook, Twitter, Flickr or even your blog with Posterous and now you can publish the same image across any of these sites via a simple email.

For instance, if you need to upload an image to Facebook, send an email to facebook@posterous.com. If you like to upload the same image to Facebook as well as Twitter, address the message to facebook+twitter@posterous.com. It’s that easy.

Flickr or Posterous?

Both Posterous and Flickr are excellent options for uploading images on the web via email but with Posterous, you don’t have to remember any complex email addresses. The other advantage is that Posterous can be integrated with multiple social sites while Flickr works only with Twitter and blogs for the moment.

Upload Photos to Twitter via Flickr Email - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)

I have been using the N97 for about a week now and there are lot of interesting features on the software side that are worth appreciating.

First it’s the personalized home screen. If you use iGoogle or Netvibes, you can immediately connect with the home screen of N97. They have these tiny blocks called widgets (Google uses the term Gadgets but they essentially the same stuff) that can be placed anywhere on the screen and the content of these individual widgets can be changed further.

You can add RSS feeds, your email inbox, Facebook updates, shortcuts to most frequently used applications or even links to your favorite web pages on the N97 desktop. Here’s a snapshot:

Because the N97 has a large 3.5" screen, you can view most web pages in their original design without much scrolling. The text remains readable in regular view but you can tap anywhere on a web page to zoom-in around that area. Tap again to switch back to the previous zoom level.

For reading busy web pages that contain too much content, you can use the mini map view of your Nokia web browser. It creates an image representation of the full web page and you can quickly jump to the section, that you want to read, by simply tapping that area.

And like most Nokia smartphones, N97 comes with Flash Lite so you can enjoy streaming Flash videos from YouTube or any of the popular video sharing sites on the phone.

Setting up email - both Google Apps for Gmail & Nokia’s Ovi - was a breeze though the N97 phone did freeze for a couple of minutes while it was downloading the first batch of unread emails via POP3/IMAP. The email program can handle most common Office attachments (including PDFs) but you need to buy a license for Adobe PDF Reader.

A unique feature in the email application of N97 is the text-to-speech reader that can narrate out loud both SMS text messages and email messages.

Nokia N97 has a camera on either sides so you can shoot self-portraits while looking at the main screen itself. The device comes preloaded with Qik (and it’s free) so you can stream live video over the web by simply hitting the capture button. I tried live-streaming for a couple of minutes this morning and it was just a fantastic experience.

You hit the Qik button your screen and this activates the video camera on the phone. Now press "Share" and you’re live on the web. While streaming, the phone screen will also display the number of viewers who are currently watching your video on the Internet. Once you are done with the streaming, this recorded video clip gets saved on your mobile phone and a copy is uploaded to the Qik site as well.

The N97 includes a very-handy "search as you type" feature which is like an mix of Google Desktop Search and Windows Vista’s Start menu.

You can type in a few characters and it will show a list of all installed applications, bookmarks, web browser’s history, photos, email messages, etc. that match your search terms. And the search results are a bit intelligent as they seem to give more priority to items that you use more frequently.

Or you can hit the green button on the device for an extended period of time and it will activate voice commands and you can speak the name of the application that you want to use (e.g. say "camera" to activate the camera). The device could recognize my accent and voice even in slightly noisy situations.

Other than RSS web feeds, Nokia N97 includes a podcasting applications for subscribing to both audio and video podcasts. The phone has 32 GB internal memory so there’s plenty of space to store all the episodes but the downside is that you can’t import your existing iTunes subscriptions (OPMPL) into N97 in one go. There’s an option to search podcasts on the web but I didn’t find that any useful either.

All N97 phones come pre-loaded with WaveSecure - it’s an anti-theft software that will automatically lock the same in case someone inserts another SIM inside the phone. Alternatively, you can log into the Wave Secure website and wipe out the data from your stolen phone permanently.

Another feature that you may enjoy about the phone is the built-in FM transmitter. You can play MP3 music on the phone and hear audio on any of the FM radios in your home or inside the car - there’s little need to burn CDs for your car anymore.

N97 includes custom applications for Facebook, AP news, Maps and Bloomberg but you can download more from the Ovi Store.  My personal favorite is the handwriting app that lets you sketch and paint on the screen using fingers (or a stylus if you have one). Here are some more screenshot images of the N97 interface.

The Indian edition of Nokia’s Ovi Store will be providing free applications from India Today, Rediff Money, NDTV and CNBC. You can also read popular Indian newspapers like The Indian Express or Dainik Jagran on the N97 through the Newshunt app. None of these are live yet but should be available when the phone hits the retail shelves in India.

Inside the Nokia N97 Web Tablet - Published at Digital Inspiration (RSS)