Convert text to audio using iSpeech
Posted on November 20, 2008 at 5:45 am
Earlier I wrote an article on Pediaphon, a free software that you can use to convert Wikipedia articles into MP3s. Though it has it’s problems, it’s a decent for anyone who really doesn’t have the time to read an article.
However, Pediaphon only works for Wikipedia articles, which kind of limits it’s use. If you are looking for a free tool to convert any text to MP3 audio, such as Word documents, RSS feeds, text files, any website, etc, then you should check out iSpeech.
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How to add Yahoo Chat Pingbox to your website
Posted on November 20, 2008 at 5:34 am
Yahoo! Messenger Pingbox allows you to have an IM like interface in your blog or any website. Visitors of your site can chat with you real time whenever you are online. Since it becomes a part of your blog it doesn’t require your visitors to install any application. This is very similar to the Google Talk ChatBack Badge from Google that you can use to chat with visitors to your website.
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Use Microsoft Word as a barcode generator
Posted on November 19, 2008 at 5:47 am
Barcode labels are easily readable by optical scanners. It is useful for operations wherein a manual reading is slower than a machine reading. Think of grocery cashier lanes and department stores – barcodes help them a lot to speed up the overall process. Most people actually don’t know how it is generated. We don’t need a special machine to create or print a barcode label. Barcodes are just plain text using a barcode font.
One of the fonts you can try is from http://www.dobsonsw.com where you can download the zipped freeware 128 font. After downloading and unzipping, copy the two .ttf files into C:\Windows\Fonts directory:
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Send secure and encrypted text via email online
Posted on November 19, 2008 at 5:34 am
Previously, I wrote about a web service called LockBin, which was a free way to send encrypted email messages for free. However, the service has been having issues and doesn’t seem to work anymore for some reason.
LockBin basically worked by encrypting the text message using some kind of hash function like MD5 or SHA1. If you really want to send an encrypted email, why not just encrypt the text yourself! You can setup Outlook for encryption, but it’s very technical and requires lots of other services in order to work correctly.
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How to check and test the strength of your passwords
Posted on November 18, 2008 at 5:56 am
I’ve written earlier about how to create strong passwords in order to avoid breaking a password using brute force. I’ve also written about free online password generators that help you create complex and strong passwords.
So now that you have a password, do you really know if is it strong? Is there a way to check and see how strong your password really is? How would it fare against a brute force attack? How long would it take to crack?
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Determine hexadecimal RGB color of anything on the screen
Posted on November 18, 2008 at 5:45 am
For serious color identification, it is important that we understand the RGB (red, green and blue) color signature. The idea of using RGB values to identify colors is taken from the color theory that colors are a combination of the three primary colors (red, green, and blue).
RGB is usually denoted using a hexadecimal triplet. A pure Blue for example is denoted as #0000FF where the first two 0’s designated red; the next two 0’s for green and the two F’s for blue. For web and interface designers, it is important to understand the colors used on their projects to make sure that the monitor display could handle the colors correctly.
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