While searching for the contact information of an old friend on Google, I came across a public records website that claimed to have the full dossier of him including his phone number and postal address. It was a paid site, the fee was very reasonable and anyone with a credit card could request access to that record. This got me excited but there was a small problem though. Since this site required my credit card details and it was my first … [Read more...]

Designers, for both web and print media, mostly use tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for doing the creatives of a project. They'll do the prototypes in PSD format but, for approval, the designs are delivered as PDFs since their clients may not have the software (Photoshop in this case) that is required to view PSD files. Read Photoshop (PSD), Fonts (TTF) and other files in the browser. That said, if you have any Photoshop (PSD) files … [Read more...]

The video player of YouTube supports quite a few keyboard shortcuts to help you quickly skip forward or backward in a video. For instance, while a video is playing, you can press the ‘0’ key to move the play head to the beginning of a video. Press the left or right arrow keys will let you go back or forward in a video by 10%. Alternatively, you may use number keys to jump to specific sections of a video – the key ‘1’ will move you to … [Read more...]

YouTube and some other video hosting websites now let you upload video clips that are up to 15 minutes in length but given the short attention span of Internet users, it is highly unlikely that people will stay with your video for that long. So how long is too long for an online video? Wistia, a video hosting service that also provides video tracking – like which parts of a video are popular with the online audience, when does their interest … [Read more...]

One night filmmaker Jim Killeen was ego-surfing on the web and found at least 24 men who shared the same name with him. Out of curiosity, he tracked down and contacted six of the other Jim Killeens only to realize that these people, though strangers from different countries, were actually quite similar. His experiences are available in a documentary titled Google Me (see trailer above). Who is a Googleganger? The act of searching your own name on … [Read more...]

You have previously seen sarees, board games, postcards and even drinks that draw inspiration from Google and to add to that list, here’s a wedding invitation card that’s purely ‘made’ of Google search results. And it’s 100% real! Nagalakshmi Viswanathan, who currently works at Google Singapore and is the author of Edible Garden, a popular blog on Indian cooking, designed this unique card using PowerPoint to invite her Google … [Read more...]

Reports are coming in that all blogs hosted on Blogger.com are currently inaccessible in India. I performed a quick traceroute against my old blog and, as you can see in the above screenshot, the request did time out after a couple of hops confirming the outage. The main blogger.com website is still accessible but all the blogspot.com sub-domains are out of reach as of now. While it would be a bit premature to say that if this is a technical … [Read more...]