MakeUseOf.com: “Cool Websites and Tools [June 29th]” plus 10 more |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [June 29th]
- The 10 Toughest Tech Questions [MakeUseOf Answers]
- 3 Free Alternatives to Google’s Feedburner
- Create an Intelligent Online News Filter Using GreatNews
- What Is oEmbed & How Does It Make Using Wordpress Easier? [Technology Explained]
- Hot Tech Deals [June 29th]
- 10 Music Search Engines To Discover Cool Music, Musicians & Great Bands
- How To Configure Adium For Custom MSN Emoticons [Mac]
- 3 Reasons To Keep Twenty-Ten Theme On Your New Wordpress Blog
- The Top 5 OCR Spell Checking Tools
- How To Open Specific Links With Other Browsers While Using Firefox
| Cool Websites and Tools [June 29th] Posted: 29 Jun 2010 08:31 PM PDT
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras. Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| The 10 Toughest Tech Questions [MakeUseOf Answers] Posted: 29 Jun 2010 07:31 PM PDT
A good answer can earn you $50 in our Best Answer of the Week contest. Just use a valid email address or your Facebook account when you answer. Winners are announced every Friday. So have a peek at this week’s toughest questions:
Many more interesting questions are waiting for you at MakeUseOf Answers. Browse by Latest Questions, Unanswered Questions or Most Popular Questions. For regular updates subscribe to the Answers RSS Feed. Need help? It’s all free and MakeUseOf Answers does not require you to sign up. Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras. Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| 3 Free Alternatives to Google’s Feedburner Posted: 29 Jun 2010 06:31 PM PDT
Whether you’re using a feed reader to manage all of your RSS feeds or you are managing your blog’s feed yourself, chances are you’re using Feedburner to do it. Feedburner is the standard when it comes to feed syndication, and alternatives are hard to come by.
Feedcat
Feedcat is one such alternative to Feedburner. They allow you to promote your feed content and measure audiences with their bookmarking, sharing, and proxy services. The site is dedicated to boosting feeds and serves as a public catalog of RSS and Atom feeds. Services and feed submission are free.
Feedcat also enables you to place a feed button anywhere on your site.
The number of readers/subscribers you have is monitored through the button and it provides an easy way to for people to subscribe to your feed. The service claims to have served over 50 million icons monthly. Feedity
Feedity creates an RSS feed for any webpage and allows for social media monitoring, the aggregating of multiple feeds, and publishing of feeds on your website.
Feedity offers a few different pricing plans but they do have a free option. They claim no setup or termination fees and that their site will always have a free option. With the free package, you are allowed 10 feeds with a feed update interval of 5 hours (not great, but not bad for personal use), and the inclusion of ads in your feed. RapidFeeds
With RapidFeeds you can create, publish, import, or manage existing feeds. Password protect your private or paid feeds and update/schedule your feeds in real-time. One plus with RapidFeeds is that it supports podcasting with iTunes, which means you could broadcast your thoughts and ideas if you wanted to start up your own podcast. RapidFeeds has a free option of their FeedManager packages that allows for 1 feed, an unlimited number of items, iTunes support, scheduling, password protection, and regular support. Other options include advanced tracking statistics, auto tweet capability, and a branded feed URL. PostRank [Honorable Mention]
PostRank, which we covered a long time ago, is a great alternative to Feedburner. The reason I’m only giving it an honorable mention in this article is because it appears that it no longer supports a free option for its users (at least I couldn’t find one). I am not aware if this will change in the future but PostRank is used by a lot of top websites and is definitely worth a mention. The service is very analytical and is the largest aggregator of social engagement data in the industry. PostRank collects social engagement data that measures user activity, which they claim is the most accurate indicator of the relevance and influence of a site. Much RSS and content data is monitored and analyzed with this service. ConclusionIn conclusion, there really isn’t a solid, free alternative to Feedburner. If you are looking for a simpler alternative that does the basic feed syndication and management things well, this list should provide a good starting point. I don’t know whether this lack of competition is due to widespread acceptance of Feedburner or not, but it is leaving those of us who would like a decent alternative shorthanded. What do you think of Feedburner’s dominance in this area? Have you used one of the above services? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below. Image Credit: magbag Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers! Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| Create an Intelligent Online News Filter Using GreatNews Posted: 29 Jun 2010 04:31 PM PDT
However, when you consider how many thousands of website, blog and even comment RSS feeds there are on the net, the task of reading through all of those RSS information streams and extracting important information is a very daunting one. Information on the Internet is so vast that if you want to collect and analyze any meaningful information, you really need to have a system where you can add as many input data streams as possible, and then use a news filter to automatically analyze, sort and respond to only the relevant and important information.
Turn GreatNews Into Your Own Private Intelligence AnalystMost major news organizations have folks back at the office who are “data miners.” These are people who specialize in digging through records and information and eventually turning up information that’s relevant to what you’re researching. If you are an expert in a given field and want to remain updating on specific niche topics that you’re interested in, I’m going to show you how you can transform GreatNews into your own private data-miner.
When you first install the GreatNews desktop app, it appears as shown above. There are default feeds and topics already on the left “feed” menu, and the center window is essentially your feed display – and it also doubles as a built-in browser that you can use to open the links and read the articles on their actual websites.
For your purpose of scouring the web for information, you’re not actually interested in subscribing to specific individual feeds as you would with a normal feed reader. Instead, you’re going to create “search feeds” that conducts Internet searches and returns the RSS feed of articles that match your query. Adding Incoming Data Feeds For GreatNewsYou set this up by clicking on “Feed” in the menu and then drilling down to Add -> Search Feed.
Let’s say you want to monitor all new Internet stories that are published on a specific person’s name. This may be a relative, a friend or someone that you’re investigating for a news story. Internet blogs are often a very valuable source of important information about any topic. Private citizens publish content every day on a huge assortment of topics, and being able to gather “public intelligence” on any keyword topic of your choice offers tremendous insight. It could also offer you a critical lead for a breaking story within your industry or field of study. You can create “RSS Search Feeds” with MSN, Flickr, or Google Blogs as a source. You just trigger the feed to conduct the search and update the feed with any changes. Now, the data source list may feel somewhat limiting. What if you’d like to know about new articles published and appearing in a standard Google search? This is what Google Alerts is for. Abhijeet previously covered Google Alerts, and Saikat wrote up a fantastic review of the service. Within Google Alerts, you can set up search queries for specific keywords, and in the “Deliver to” field, you can change the delivery method from “Email” to “Feed.
When you do this and click “Create Alert,” Google Alerts creates a customized RSS search feed for you based on results from a standard Google search for that keyword phrase. Your feed will update anytime anything new appears within Google search listings for that keyword phrase. To add this as another valuable data stream to your GreatNews information analysis system, simply highlight and copy the feed URL from Alerts, and paste it into the Feed URL field when you create a new GreatNews feed.
It’s a very good idea to take the time to go through and set up as many search feeds as you can, so that you have as much incoming data as possible. Now that you’ve set up your data sources from throughout the Internet, it’s time to configure GreatNews to analyze and sort that information for you. Turn GreatNews Into A News FilterIf you have a feed reader, than you’ve probably experienced “information overload” from all of the feeds you’ve set up. There’s so much information about things you don’t care about that it’s easy to miss the articles about the things you do. So, first you’re going to organize all of your feeds using the GreatNews news filter, based on the keyword topics you’re interested in monitoring.
In the left menu, right click “All Labels” and select Add -> Feed Group. Type in the topic or phrase that you are monitoring, and then click and drag all of the feeds you created into that Feed Group.
Now you’ve organized all of your incoming data feeds by search topic. When you left click on the group, you’ll see feed listings from all of the feeds you’ve added. If you wanted to, you could simply scan through these for titles that interest you and then click on “Label This” to pick off the specific stories that interest you.
You can create a new label for the sub-topic that title falls into. For example if you’re monitoring all articles about Microsoft, you may find a story about Bill Gates, so you’d create a label called “Microsoft: Bill Gates.” This lets you click set aside important stories into “folders” that you can go back and read later. The thing is – I’m much too busy to scroll through and pick off those topics manually. Wouldn’t it be better to have GreatNews do it for you? You can do this by right clicking on the Feed Group you created for a particular search term, and select Add -> News Watch.”
This is where it gets really cool. In this window, you can identify more specific keywords that you want GreatNews to use to pluck out stories that really interest you. For example, in a case we’re investigating, I’m looking for any new reports about a specific person that references the term “stolen valor.” So I will configure a “News Watch” that will flag all titles which cover that aspect of this topic.
Now, when you open up GreatNews, you can go directly to your special “News Watches” area and check those specific topics that you are monitoring for any new articles or news reports that were recently published.
In this example, I just had GreatNews automatically sift through hundreds of news articles on a general topic that I’m investigating, and then I had it pluck out specific articles that cover sub-topics I’ve defined as very important to me. Now, instead of scrolling through hundreds of titles, you can open up GreatNews and it will serve you the article that you wanted on a silver platter – no manual searching required on your part! Have you ever tried using GreatNews to cut down on information overload? Give it a shot and report back what you think of the service in the comments section below. Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
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| What Is oEmbed & How Does It Make Using Wordpress Easier? [Technology Explained] Posted: 29 Jun 2010 02:31 PM PDT
Ever since version 2.9, Wordpress has given users the ability to link from several services (such as Flickr and YouTube) and have the content automatically embedded without you having to grab a bunch of code. Wordpress uses the oEmbed protocol to accomplish this. You might be asking “so what is this oEmbed thing all about and how does it help a Wordpress user like me?”
What Is oEmbed for Wordpress?oEmbed has been described several different ways. The Wordpress Codex describes it this way:
oEmbed’s homepage also gives a description:
So basically, oEmbed makes it possible for a webpage (ie. a Wordpress site) to turn a link into embedded media simply by sending a request to the originator of the media content (such as YouTube or Flickr) for the embed code. OK, so what does all that mean to me as a Wordpress user? How Does oEmbed Work With Wordpress?If you remember my example at the beginning about how Facebook handles YouTube links, you will know how YouTube links work in Wordpress 2.9 and later. You used to have to stop what you were doing, find the video to be embedded, and then find the embed code to paste into the HTML version of the post you were working on. This process worked fine but now things are easier because of oEmbed. Now, just grab the link. There are two ways of using the link. Allow me to demonstrate how it works using my own Wordpress site.
In basic terms that is what oEmbed is and how it works with Wordpress. Wordpress does not allow use of just any old URL with oEmbed for security reasons. There is a list of accepted sites on the Wordpress Codex page about embeds. It should also be mentioned that you can add more sites. This process should be left for another article to cover. Wordpress seems to be on a never ending journey to make our lives easier. This embedding ability is just another small example. What Wordpress feature do you like that makes your life easier? Have you tried oEmbed? Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| Posted: 29 Jun 2010 01:30 PM PDT
For more fresh hot deals, visit our Hot Tech Deals page, which is constantly updated.
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| 10 Music Search Engines To Discover Cool Music, Musicians & Great Bands Posted: 29 Jun 2010 12:31 PM PDT
Our hunger for tunes has yet to get saturated. In fact, in spite of being a tech site in feel and color we too have a weekly feature called Sound Sunday. It's a humble little place to discover fresh sounds for free.
But if you are planning to lose your way in the musical maze, why not use a few music search engines or read a few music blogs? The web tools mentioned here are in no way an absolute list; but they can point you towards the sources for music, musicians, and bands. So let's hit it. Fimusy
Fimusy (beta) is a new music search engine that helps you find information on bands and the songs they play. It brings all the information on a single page. You can go through a brief profile, video snapshots, photos (wallpapers, CD covers etc), and tracks which can be streamed. You can go on to buy the tracks and albums from iTunes or Amazon. There's also a user voting system which helps to rank favorite artists and bands on the homepage. Check out the Top lists on the right. BandFreaks
BandFreaks is a music search engine, but it is for searching out new and unsigned bands. It could be a great way to search for and sample emerging artists. With unknown musicians, a keyword query is difficult. Three dropdowns help you to narrow down the kind of music you would like to listen to. The results are a mix of a brief introduction and a link that leads you to pages where you can listen to their music. And get to know them better. SongBoxx
SongBoxx is a music meta-search engine that is an index of 7,000,000 tracks. The site does not host or directly stream any music. The search results come up pretty fast. Song previews (mp3 or video) if available for the track can be accessed. The audio previews are of low quality. You can go on to purchase the songs from accredited stores. An advanced search service is expected soon for the music website. LivePlasma
LivePlasma (formerly MusicPlasma) is a fun way of discovering music (and movies). The fun is in the bubbles that come up and map your query to related artists and bands. The site uses the Amazon API to create all the interrelated information. It's casual fun although I found that the links that point to the discographies on Amazon are broken. The ones for the movies work. Mix Turtle
Mix Turtle is a music search engine that we have covered before. Try it out again as it isn't as slow as the hard-backed reptile. The single search box and the auto-suggest feature that drops down help you to start your search for song and singer. You can add songs to your playlist or preview the clips. If one of the sources does not work, you can move to another. Clicking on the red Live button on top also reveals the songs that are being played at that moment. Audiobaba
Audiobaba (beta) finds songs that sound similar to the one you put in as the query. The idea behind the acoustic search of Audiobaba's search engine is to discover new songs by matching it to the ones you like to hear. You can listen to the sample previews, and if you like them, you can purchase them at Amazon or iTunes. Hear a song you like and add it to your bookmarks or favorites. You can also filter the matches with a slider to show tracks that are mainstream, normal, or independent. The Hype Machine
The Hype Machine is one of the top ranked musical blog aggregators. It indexes blogs and the song files they host and makes it searchable, so you can read as well as listen. The slick toolbar at the bottom should catch your attention as you can do it all with a click. Check out the zeitgeist section and the visual artwork plus the top tracks collection. The Spy section is like a real time feed of the songs people are voting up. It also helps that the music site is beautifully designed. Elbows
Here's another one which could just complete your reading and listening treat. Elbows is another beautifully done blog. You can follow the music blog posts and discover new “old” artists and their music files. As is usual with most blogs, watch the Hot Tracks and Hot Videos lists. AllMusic
AllMusic.com is not a music search engine. But if you want one music guide for your bookmark, this is it. It is a great reference for everything that's about music. Artists and their music are catalogued in detail. The little snapshot below tells you the ways you can search for the music you love.
The other little number is that the human capital behind the site includes 900 music critics who are on top of their job and what's going on in the music industry. Also, try out their Advanced Search that drills down to the music in a series of dropdowns. The site also provides a Firefox add-on, but I think you can give this add-on a miss and take the next one on our list. FindThatBand
All this while you have been opening another tab and typing in your search query. FindThatBand is a Firefox add-on that reduces that effort to a matter of selecting the text and right-clicking. The music add-on taps into Allmusic, Amazon, Discogs, Grooveshark, iLike, iTunes, LastFM, MySpace, Pandora, The Hype Machine, or Wikipedia. If you are a music freak, this little add-on is a great search accelerator. These are just ten little ways to feed our listening pleasure. I am sure you have lots more to add. Tell us about your favorite music and band discovery tools. Image Credit: Max Sparber Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras. Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| How To Configure Adium For Custom MSN Emoticons [Mac] Posted: 29 Jun 2010 11:31 AM PDT
One of the less pleasant discoveries upon migrating to Mac OS X is that Microsoft’s Messenger client (for Mac) is as bad as they come. Or, as others might put it, complete crap. Of course, there are alternative IM applications for our beloved Mac. I’m thinking about aMSN, an expendable but oftentimes messy MSN clone; Trillian, multi-protocol minimalism; and, most famously, Adium.
Below is an Adium fix, so you can hang out with the cool guys once again. 1. Receiving Custom EmoticonsLater versions of Adium already allow you to receive and display custom emoticons while talking with MSN correspondents. However, a bug has kept some Adium installs from putting this, otherwise default, feature to use.
Double-checking doesn’t hurt. Open Adium -> Preferences… -> Advanced -> MSN and make sure the checkbox next to ‘Display custom emoticons‘ is ticked. If you can’t find this setting, and you’re using at least Adium v.1.4, you needn’t worry about this bug; it’s already taken care of in some later releases. 2. Sending Custom Emoticons (Unofficial Fix)Sending custom emoticons is not a default feature (yet), but Fabio Gallonetto made his own alterations to Adium’s (open) source code. Read more about it on his blog. The essence of the matter is that after appending said changes and recompiling the application, the preferences pane shows an option to add custom smileys with nothing more than a shortcut and the path to an image file.
Once we’re done, you’ll be able to find this option under Adium -> Preferences… -> Appearance by clicking on the Customize… button next to your default emoticon pack. Adium can sometimes be stubborn about the shortcut you’re trying to specify. To avoid this, click outside of the text field to deselect it, before pressing Close. 2.a – Download An Already Fixed Adium v.1.4 (Beta)Compiling an application (i.e. creating an executable file from the source code), although considered rudimentary among programmers, can be quite daunting for us regular folks. In consideration, Fabio Gallonetto (the developer of this fix) put online a precompiled copy of the fixed Adium. This file uses Adium version 1.4 (beta), so know that even though it performs admirably at the moment, at some point in time it’s going to be outdated. But, for now, it’s everything you could wish for. Download fixed Adium-1.4 [alternative link] This ZIP file contains the (fixed) Adium application. Head over to your Applications folder, put your current Adium installation somewhere safe, and replace it with the unpacked file you just downloaded. This Adium replacement should retain all your current preferences! 2.b – Fix & Compile A Different Version Of Adium YourselfYou might be enticed to fix and compile a different version of the Adium source code. Before you do, note these concerns. Appending this fix, and recompiling Adium is only advised for advanced computer users; (amateur) developers that know their way around applications like Xcode. Xcode alone is a 2GB download, and although a relatively user-friendly application, still a mighty impressive suite. Rather than a how-to guide, this part is for reference. To build Adium, you’ll need Xcode, which can be obtained here after registering for the free Apple Developer program. Where to get the source-code is specified on the Adium Wiki. The patch can be downloaded from here (as a diff file). Do you have anything to add to this subject? Perhaps you feel like Mac users are missing out on a wholly different IM client that doesn’t even require a fix. We’d love to hear from you in the comments section below! Got Questions? Ask Them Now FREE on MakeUseOf Answers! Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| 3 Reasons To Keep Twenty-Ten Theme On Your New Wordpress Blog Posted: 29 Jun 2010 10:31 AM PDT
Strangely, among those thousands of third party themes, there were only two official themes that came with the Wordpress installation: Classic theme version 1.5 and Default theme version 1.6. To make things worse, those two official themes were also not too customizable. But Wordpress developers wanted to change that. They have released the latest version of Wordpress – v 3.0 – along with a brand new highly-customizable official theme called the Twenty-Ten theme (maybe to commemorate the year of its release – 2010).
Whole Lotta WidgetsAfter upgrading to Wordpress 3.0, you’ll see the Twenty-Ten theme under the “Appearance” side menu. Activate the theme by clicking on the “Activate” link.
Then you can start the customization ritual by clicking the first menu under Theme: “Widgets“. Widgets in Wordpress are enhancements to a theme. You can use the widgets to add mini functionalities from a simple calendar to HTML codes.
There are a bunch of widgets that you can use here. Those who live and breathe Wordpress will be familiar with them.
But what makes widgets in Twenty-Ten special are the widget areas. Most themes give users one or two widget areas while here there are six of them.
For Wordpress newbies, you can use widgets by dragging and dropping them onto the widget areas that you want. My personal favorite is the Text widget because you can put customizable codes here.
Just remember to hit the “Save” button after writing down the code. Another nice thing about Wordpress 3.0 and Twenty-Ten in terms of widgets support is the existence of the “Inactive Widgets” area. In the previous version of Wordpress, deactivating a widget meant losing its settings. Now you can temporarily deactivate widgets while retaining their settings by dragging them to this area.
And when you want to re-activate them again, simply drag them back to the widgets area. You don’t have to do any re-settings. What’s On The Menu?The next item under “Appearance” is “Menus“. We have discussed this topic a little bit in the previous article. Basically, this feature allows you to add customized navigation to your blog page.
You can add a menu as a sub menu just by dragging and dropping it under another menu.
Here’s what the menus look like in the blog page.
Customizing The Background & HeaderThis feature might be a very common thing among avid Wordpress users who use themes heavily. Nonetheless, this is a welcome addition to enhancing Wordpress’s built in theme. With Custom Background you can upload your chosen image.
And select the background color.
While with Custom Header, you also can upload a header image. You can use the techniques explained in our older article to create your own Website Header Image.
The recommended size of the image is 980 X 198 pixels.
Or you can use one of a range of web headers offered by Wordpress.
At the very bottom of this page, you will find options to remove and reset the image.
Don’t forget to click the “Save Changes” button to keep your settings. To let you see what the Twenty-Ten theme looks like, here’s a blog quickly set up with the theme.
Twenty-Ten might not be as powerful as Constructor, but it’s good enough for most of us who don’t want to dig deeper for hidden features, but just want a ready-to-use good-looking theme. If you are still not sure about changing your blog theme to Twenty-Ten, you can try it first to see what will it look like. Use the tips from this article. Have you tried Wordpress 3.0 and the Twenty-Ten theme? What’s your opinion about them? Please let us know in the comments below. Hey Facebookers, make sure to check out MakeUseOf page on Facebook. Over 24,000 fans already!
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| The Top 5 OCR Spell Checking Tools Posted: 29 Jun 2010 09:31 AM PDT
Unfortunately, most free OCR services do not provide an OCR spell checking feature. In this article I am going to introduce the best spell checking tools for post-processing OCR texts. This includes alternatives for existing tools that do not provide internal OCR spell checking.
Google DocumentsMost OCR services will allow you to export the result to plain text. For further processing you can upload to Google Documents, which also comes with an internal spell checker. Unfortunately, the spell checker is very basic and doesn’t allow you to select languages or add words it’s missing.
SpellJaxSpellJax is an online spell checker. You can paste your text and have it check the spelling. Misspelled words are underlined in red. A left-click on the word opens a box with suggestions, but you can also enter your own correction or > OK the word in question.
An alternative to SpellJax is SpellCheck. FirefoxFirefox comes with an internal spell checker that you can use to your advantage. Saikat wrote a very good article on How To Spell Check With The Firefox Dictionary. Briefly, the Firefox spell checker is enabled by default and can be triggered under > Tools > Advanced > General > Check My Spelling As I Type. Misspelled words are underlined in red and right-clicking on them will provide suggestions from the dictionary. You can select > Add to Dictionary to teach the dictionary a new word. You can also add new dictionaries. Right-click into a text box with more than one line, select > Languages and > Add Dictionaries… from the menu. This will take you to the Firefox dictionaries and language packs page. You’ll find more information about using the Firefox spell checker on this Mozilla page. The Firefox spell checker comes in handy when you use an online OCR tool that presents the result in a text field, as for example Free OCR does. Firefox will instantly mark misspelled words and you can go ahead and correct them.
For a more detailed review on Free OCR and two more tools, read my article 3 Online OCR Services To Convert Scanned Docs To Text. TopOCRThe best solution of course is to use an OCR tool that comes with its own internal spell checker. TopOCR is one of them and it’s definitely top notch. It delivers a full-featured text editor that is a charm to work with. In addition, it has a built in spell checker that supports 11 languages. Before you let the OCR do its magic you need to preset the language under > Settings > Language in the Image Window to the left. Per default the spell checking feature is turned off. In the Text Window go to > Other and put a checkmark infront of > Spell Check. Then go ahead and edit the text to your liking.
Saikat has previously reviewed the best OCR software in this article: Top 5 Free OCR Software Tools To Convert Images Into Text. Let me just mention that Simple OCR also comes with a spell checker. However, don’t bother, it’s a pain. Microsoft OfficeAfter extracting text from an image with Microsoft Office Document Imaging, you export the text to Microsoft Word. Here you can use the internal spell checker. The great advantage is that you can choose between many different languages and teach new words to the various dictionaries. So if you happen to own a copy of Microsoft Office, I absolutely recommend it for spell checking your OCR texts. An obvious alternative to Microsoft Office is OpenOffice, which essentially comes with the same features as its commercial competitor. However, while OpenOffice does offer full featured spell checking, it does not offer OCR. Which OCR spell checking app do you recommend? Image Credit: mandiberg NEW: Download MakeUseOf iPhone App. FREE! Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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| How To Open Specific Links With Other Browsers While Using Firefox Posted: 29 Jun 2010 08:31 AM PDT
In the past you would open a link in a new browser window by opening the browser and browsing to the page you need to test or you could fire up a tool like Browsershots that we have previously profiled. But what if you want an easy way to tell Firefox to open that link in a different browser? Well now you can with a Firefox extension called Open With.
When you arrive at the plug-in page you will see this:
All you need to do is click on the Add to Firefox green button. You NEED to do this from inside Firefox. This will not work in any other browser. Once you have installed the extension and restarted Firefox, you will now be able to open a link in any of your installed browsers. For each browser that you have installed on your machine, you will have a icon for each in your context menu. When the application is first installed it scans your machine to see what browsers are installed. I have Internet Explorer and Firefox on my machine. So now when I right click on a hyperlink I now see this in my context menu:
Upon selecting the open link with Internet Explorer link it will do just that – open up the page in Internet Explorer. Now you can do whatever you need to do from within your Internet Explorer window like Windows Updates or other sites Microsoft forces you to use IE on. When testing webpages in different browsers this makes it a breeze. I have tried other applications in the past like Corel IE Tab and the fact that you can get other browsers to work with this makes it simply awesome. Let's take a look at the extension's options which you can get to by going to Tools –> Options –> Manage Add Ons –> Then click options under Open With. That will bring us to this screen:
You can choose between buttons or menu items for each of the display options which is no big deal but the manual entries menu tab makes this application a lot more powerful. Some online users reported Open With having problems with browsers after they were updated. If you run into these issues drop on by here:
Browser to the browser of your choice and you will be able to name it and set how it launches your browser (you can use switches!)
To add switches or edit the command it will use to launch your browser all you need to do is highlight the browser you want to modify and hit edit command and that will allow you to modify the line.
Do you have another application that helps you easily use other browsers? We would love to hear about them in the comments! Do you like MakeUseOf articles? Don’t forget to share our articles with others! It’s really important to us. Similar MakeUseOf Articles
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If you have been using 
If you’re in the market for a new computer, laptop, mobile phone, games and other accessories; don’t waste your time searching online. We’ve taken the liberty of locating the best tech deals and unifying them into a single post for your convenience.
The web is a concert stage with a free entry ticket for music buffs. Music search is so popular that Google itself has a 
MSN, nowadays going by the name Windows Live Messenger, is in many parts of the world still the leading instant messaging protocol.
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting text captured in an image into a text document. This procedure is rarely flawless since little irregularities in the image, think of a newspaper scan, may cause the OCR software to make mistakes. Hence, spell checking is an indispensable step in completing any OCR job.
I absolutely love Firefox and I have been using it as my full time browser for some time now. There are also a lot of times where I need to open a link in a new browser window like in Internet Explorer, or if I need to test a website for usability, I might need to test a page in several different browsers.
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