InstantWatcher.com (Faster Interface to Netflix Streaming)

InstantWatcher is a Faster Interface to Netflix Streaming

If you're a frequent viewer of Netflix's streaming fare, you're probably numb to how inefficient the rental service's browsing and search pages can be. InstantWatcher is a soothing balm of clean, fast movie browsing.

You'll still need to be logged into your Netflix account to get much out of InstantWatcher, but once you're in, you'll find dozens of ways to filter and search films. Movies featuring Clint Eastwood and Shirley MacLaine? Just type in their names. Check which films won't be available for streaming soon? Sure, just click one button.

Each page of results can be listed as straight-up titles, text with year, directors, and actors, a few lines of synopsis, or a picture-only box art view. Every result has a "Play" or "queue" link, and a left-hand sidebar offers related YouTube videos, Wikipedia and IMDB links for movie results, and nary an ad but on the right-hand side.

One of those web resources you truly hope the big enchilada it's working off of takes notice of—and soon. Free to use, no sign-up required.

InstantWatcher.com

InstantWatcher is a Faster Interface to Netflix Streaming

Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents

How to Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents

Have you ever struggled to get the formatting of a long document looking like you want in each section?  Let’s explore the Breaks tool in Word and see how you can use breaks to get your documents formatted better.

Word includes so many features, it’s easy to overlook some that can be the exact thing we’re looking for.  Most of us have used Page Breaks in Word, but Word also includes several other breaks to help your format your documents.  Let’s look at each break and see how you can use them in your documents.

Where are all the breaks hiding?

If you’re using Office 2007 or 2010, you can insert a Page Break from the Insert tab.  All the other breaks are listed in the Page Layout tab.  Click the Breaks button, and you’ll see all 7 of the page and section breaks you can use in Word.

Ok, now you’re ready to add breaks to your document.  Here’s what each one can do:

Page Break

Page Break is the one most of us have used, and you can add one from the Insert tab or the Page Layout tab.  As you likely already know from experience, page breaks only start you on the next page; all formatting will be kept the same from your original page to your new one.  Use this when you want to just start typing on a new page but want the formatting to all stay the same.

Column Break

Have you ever been writing a multi-column document and wanted the last line on the column to go to the next line?  You could just press Enter a couple more times, but then your formatting will be messed up if you edit your text.  A better way is to insert a Column Break.  This will move you to the next column, leaving your previous text in the first column.  If you go back and add more text to the first column, it’ll just go on down in the same column unless you add enough to overflow it.

Text Wrapping

Want to have caption text around a picture?  Select the text beside the picture, and select Text Wrapping.  This will let you keep this text together with consistent formatting, and will flow the rest of the document around this section.

Next Page, Section Break, and Even/Odd Page Breaks

The most important break, in our opinion, is the Next Page break.  Unlike the standard Page Break, this option moves you to the next page and gives you entirely separate formatting in the new section.  The Even and Odd Page breaks let you insert a section break and go to the next even or odd page, respectively, so you can easily format your documents for left and right pages in a book.  Alternately, the Continuous break does the same thing without putting you on a new page.

Want to switch from 2 column text to single column, or want to apply a new font scheme to only the cover page?  This is the break you’ll want.  Now you can format a full document with cover, contents, and references, all with their own unique formatting but saved in the same document.

Using Section Breaks with Footers

Formatting footers correctly takes a bit more work.  By default, your document footers will have the same content even on pages with section breaks.  To change this, double-click a header or footer in the new section of your document, and click the Link to Previous button to turn linking off.  Now your footers and headers will be fully unique between your document sections.

You can also choose to just keep your first page or your odd and even pages with different footers and headers.  To do this, check the appropriate box on Options in the Footer and Header Design tab.

Now you can take advantage of all the different types of document breaks to get your documents formatted just like you need.  Microsoft often mentions that 90% of it’s users only use 10% of the features in Office.  Hopefully this will help you take advantage of a little more of Office’s features to make it easier to format documents.

How to Use Breaks in Microsoft Word to Better Format Your Documents - How-To Geek

FreeOCR.net - free optical character recognition program

Get it Download' target=_blank>here.

Have you ever faced a situation where you needed to obtain editable text out of an image or a PDF file created from a scanned document? What you need in this case is "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) software that will literally "read" the document and try to identify characters and words visually, and FreeOCR.net is just such a program.

FreeOCR.net performs optical character recognition on images or PDF files that have a scanned origin. It can process PDF, TIF, BMP, JPG, and PNG files and provides an acquire function for running documents through a scanner. The simple user interface allows you to exclude non text elements (such as images or tables), although this has to be done manually.

For documents with multiple pages, each individual page has to be processed by the user separately, although FreeOCR will "pool" the output into a single text. FreeOCR.net is based on the open source Tesseract OCR engine and comes pre-installed with English support, although many other languages can be downloaded and added (including non latin character based languages such as Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, etc.)

This is an excellent basic OCR app that can get the job done. It works really well for use on the occasional document, or at least short documents. It is possible to process long documents (ebooks, etc), but in this case you would be better off with some of the more professional (and paid) apps that are out there.

PROS:

• Powerful engine: produces excellent results in general, at least for English which I tested. Note that images are recommended to be scanned at 200 dpi or more.
• Supported formats: processes PDF and most image filetypes (and will not restrict you to TIF as some others do).
• Supports a wide range of languages: English comes pre-installed, but other languages can be installed separately (see here). Languages include French, Italian, German/Fraktur, Spanish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Bangla, Czech, Catalan, Polish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Korean, Slovakian, Ukranian, Japanese, Indonesian, Norwegian, Hungarian, Serbian, Turkish, Tagalog, Romanian, Chinese (traditional & simplified), and Swedish.
• Simple interface: allows for selecting chunks of text to process, such as to circumvent pictures and other elements.

CONS:

• Does not process pages in batch: as it is designed to do one page at a time, which limits its usefulness for large documents.
• No post-OCR processing: such as spellchecking for example.
• No user-assisted "learning": such as employed by some other commercial OCR packages.

The verdict: an excellent free OCR solution. If you need to convert the occasional scanned document to editable text this will do the job. However, if you need to process hundreds of pages it can do the job in theory but is likely to be too labor intensive (much less labor intensive that re-typing though!).

Although I only tested English, the multi language support is quite noteworthy. If you do use for other language (esp. non latin) please post on your experience in the comments section. Thanks.

Version Tested: 3.0

FreeOCR.net: free optical character recognition program converts images to text in multiple languages | freewaregenius.com

Read It Later

Read It Later lets you mark any article for reading later on your browser or smartphone.

 

Shelf Web Pages Instantly (and Get Back to Work) with ReadItLater

Surely you come across web pages during the workday that are completely unrelated to actual work, but that you'd love to save for later—and the previously mentioned (and award winning) Firefox extension ReadItLater does just that really well. Once ReadItLater is part of your everyday workflow, it's super-easy to park long articles or interesting tidbits you want to look at over lunch or at home in a "staging area" that's available as an RSS feed, in your regular bookmarks, and even on other computers. ReadItLater may appear unnecessary to power bookmarkers who keep a "later" folder or tag, but on closer inspection it does offer features that make hitting the snooze button on a link much easier.

The Killer Feature: One-click Park

Without ReadItLater, to save a web page in your bookmarks in a "read it later" folder or tag, it takes a couple of steps. (Even with Firefox 3's one-click bookmarking, you still have to tag or file the link.) With ReadItLater installed, Firefox gets a checkbox in the address bar next to the regular bookmark star icon. Click on that checkbox to automatically add the current web page to your ReadItLater list in one click. That's it. Now you can get back to work. Alternately, if you don't even want to open the tempting link but want to save it for later, right-click on a link and choose "Read This Link Later" from the context menu. If you're want to add a bunch of links on a single page to your reading list even more quickly, then activate "Click to Save" mode (Alt+M by default, or click the ReadItLater icon in the status bar). When you do, clicking on any link doesn't open it, it adds it to your reading list. This feature is especially good for shelfing several items of interest you might find on link-heavy pages like the Digg or Lifehacker front page.

Check Your Reading List

Once you've added a few pages to your ReadItLater list, you can click on the ReadItLater dropdown on the right of Firefox's search box to expand the list of items you've parked there. ReadItLater conveniently sorts the links by oldest added (by default, you can change this), so you see the stuff that's been hanging out there the longest at the top. You can quickly filter the list by tag, page name, site, or URL, too. See that handy number 10 on the ReadItLater toolbar button? That's the number of unread items you have. This feature isn't turned on by default, but it's nice to instantly see how many items are in your reading queue. To turn it on, in ReadItLater's options, under Appearance, check off "Show number of unread items on the toolbar button," as shown.

Read Your Pages

Now that you've built up a reading list, you're eating lunch at your desk and want to do some personal browsing. Click on any link from that list dropdown to visit a page. All done? Simply click the ReadItLater checkbox to mark the item as read and immediately take it off your list. If you want tor permanently save it on your boomarks service of choice, hit the dropdown on that checkbox and pick your bookmark poison.

Syncing Your ReadItLater List

One of the really cool features of ReadItLater is that it automatically saves links to your Firefox bookmarks in a folder you specify. So if you're already syncing your bookmarks across computers with the likes of Foxmarks, your reading list goes to other computers even if you don't have the ReadItLater extension installed on them (but you don't get its neat interface). ReadItLater has a syncing mechanism built in, too. You set up an RSS feed of your reading items, and then log in with your feed ID and a password to get your list on other computers with ReadItLater installed. Visit ReadItLater's Options dialog, under RSS/Syncing, to set that up.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Offline Reading

If clicking around Firefox ain't your bag, baby, ReadItLater has you covered. Customize your keyboard shortcuts for even faster access to your queue in the Options dialog. ReadItLater also can save web pages you want to read on an airplane, for instance, to your hard drive for offline access. From the ReadItLater list dropdown, while you're online, click on the "Read Offline" link to make ReadItLater save local copies of the pages on your list.

Read It Later: Save Your One Read Wonders

Chess.com

If you like to play chess, chess.com allows you to play in your browser, on Facebook, or on your smartphone.  Play live, or turn-based.  Join chess.com and invite me to play a game (user id is delao13).

Play Chess Online - Free Chess Games at Chess.com