Tag: Interesting Links

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WorldTimeBuddy – Simple and Easy to Use Online World Clock

Do you have friends or colleagues you have to work with from around the world. If you do contact people from different countries, then I am quite sure you have some sort of world clock on your computer. This is crucial because, what might be a sunny afternoon for you, might be in the middle of the night for someone else. No use, calling someone in the middle of the night. Right? 🙂

I sometimes catch up with cousins from the US and Australia. Sometimes to schedule a meeting with all of them at the same time is quite difficult. The US is 9.30 hours behind Indian Standard Time and Sydney, Australia is a 5.30 hours ahead.

In this scenarios where you have to keep in mind, time zones of more than two countries World Time Buddy is a useful website.

This website makes it quite easy for setting and planning schedules, taking into account 3 or more different time zones.

Extra Tip for using WorldTimeBuddy

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Try creating a application shortcut on your computer if you are using Chrome browser. Just visit the website (http://worldtimebuddy.com ) and then look up the spanner symbol to the top right hand corner. Click on it and look up Tools. Under Tools, click on Create Application Shortcut.

This will now have shortcut to the world time clock on desktop and programs, which can be used like a application.

Do try out WorldTimeBuddy and drop in your comments.

Link: WorldTimeBuddy

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[Online Tip] Temporary Email ID that Forwards to Your Permanent Account!

In this “Age of the Internet” we come across a lot of new services. These services most times requires you to sign up/register with an email account. While taking a look at such services, I am often a little sceptical of sharing my primary email id. Hence, I end up creating email ids I used as dumps for signing up.

TrashMail allows us to create a temporary email ID and have the emails sent to the temporary account, forwarded to your permanent email id.

TrashMail Features

  • As you can see in the image above, TrashMail allows creating customized temporary email ids.
  • Just enter your real email address so you can receive all the emails sent to your temporary email id.
  • A good feature I liked about this site, is I can limit the number of forwards. This works great if you are spammed by some service which has temporary email id.
  • Finally I could tweak the Life Span of the disposable account from 1 day to 1 month.

This will help down cut spamming your email address. If you have a Hotmail account as your primary account then you can also try creating alias accounts feature. Try out TrashMail and do drop in your comments with your views on junk e-mail and ways to combat it.

Link: TrashMail

Related: 10MinuteMail | Guerrilla Mail

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Create Countdown timer for your website with online tool

Many websites when launched use countdown timers. This timer usually tells you the time in days, hours, minutes and seconds, that it will take for the website to go live. If you are new to blogging or want a quick count down timer to be embedded in your website then Countdown Calendar will be quite helpful.

Countdown Calendar Features

  • I could customize the width of the timer along with background colour.
  • Another customization is selecting down to a time and date which the clock carries out a countdown. I could customized most elements including the image that goes with the timer.
  • The only thing that I did not like was that I could not customize the font. This might be a problem but as we get the HTML code for embedding the timer in out website, we can tweak this code to customized the font if needed.

In the case you are looking to embed a quite timer which countdowns to a website launch or even your birthday, try out Countdown Calendar. Do drop in your comments.

Link: Countdown Calendar

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Use Family Friendly Yippy Search for categorized search results

The term search has become synonymous with the name of Google because of the search engines dominance. The openness of Google is obviously something that makes it a great blog. When people search online for certain keywords, that information can be tracked and used to provide better results.

By lately many people prefer more privacy when it comes to search habits. There is also the idea of having search engine churn out links which are valid for all ages. Yippy search is a new search service which tries to be family friendly and promises privacy.

Yippy Search Features

  • The best feature of this is how well Yippy search organizes the results into different categories.
  • For example, I searched for HTML and all results were categorized into Editors, Tutorials, Codes and so on.

Most new search services are nowhere close to Google as a whole but many of them have unique features which make it quite useful. Yippy search is useful for its search results being categorized in a simple and easy interface.

Try out Yippy Search and let me know your views through your comments.

Link: Yippy Search

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Convert and Download YouTube Videos to PC, Mobiles and iPods

YouTube is most preferred when it comes to watching videos online. This makes it the most popular when it comes to looking up the latest music. If you are someone who listens to a lot of music on YouTube, you might want to look up Downloadable YouTube which allows converting YouTube links into files compatible with Windows, Mac, Mobile or an iPod/PSP device.

Downloadable YouTube Features

  • As seen in the image above, the link just has to be pasted and then select the type of file you want it to be converted to.
  • It supports conversion into .MPG, .MOV, .3GP, .FLV (flash), .MP3 and .MP4.
  • This makes it compatible with mobile almost any gadget that you might be using to listen to music.

If you liked this online tool to convert YouTube video into files formats then you might want to check out list of 5 websites to convert YouTube videos into MP3.

Try out Downloadable YouTube and do drop in you comments and views about similar services.

Link: Downloadable YouTube

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Improve Your Search Queries with SortFix [Search Tool]

All search engines expect you to search for something with 2 or 3 keywords. These combination of 3 different keywords will end up giving us decent search results.

The problem here is what if you are not sure about which keywords to use. You can actually end up searching through pages and scores of results from Google.

SortFix tries to help us search better with some interesting features by suggesting relevant keywords.

  • If you see, I searched my own name. I was automatically suggested some more keywords to be included.
  • These suggestions were like devilsworkshop, blog, twitter and Facebook.
  • I obviously did not want to Twitter and Facebook related links but wanted links related to devils workshop. I could simply drag and drop the suggested keywords to be included or excluded.
  • The search shows results from Bing, Bing Images, YouTube and obviously Google.

Now a days even Google is worried about content farms and is trying its best to block such results and with over 1 million spam pages created every hour on the internet, I found the concept behind SortFix very useful. It can also be used as a Firefox add-on.

Do try out SortFix and let me know your views through the comments.

Link: SortFix | Firefox Add-on

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India Rail Info: Best portal for Indian Railways inquiry!

Finally I gathered enough courage to start writing about this website. Confused? India Rail Info is one website for Railway inquiries I have been using for past 1 year and there is no reason I would start using any other website, not even the Government railways portal. Since the portal hosts “so many” features, I would be unable to discuss them all here. However here are few of the important and unique features.

Excellent Navigation

Get a list of trains between any two stations or even just type out the Number or Name of the train. The website even helps you in completing names.

Personalized Experience

Login using Facebook or Google account and get to do all things with your history constantly saved. For e.g. PNR status lookup, Trains lookup, Blog entries and a lot more is saved.

PNR Prediction

The first of its kind, though not official but ofcourse helpful. This one I love to use as I can get recommendations from people on whether my waitlisted ticket will get confirmed or stay as waitlisted. You too can predict for other people and this builds up your profile. For e.g. you predict over 3 PNR entries & 2 prediction turns correct, so your profile will display an accuracy of 66.67%.

No Advertisement

Many people often think of it as a government-operated website as there is not even a single Advertisement hosted. What an irony, that even our Government railway inquiry website hosts so many advertisements that I go crazy using it.

Patience is Exciting

By this I just meant that initially the website may look a bit complex to you (so what? even Indian Railways is a complex network :P), however if you just have some patience and try few features, you would definitely fall in love with it.

When I visited the Government-run Indian Railways website, this is what I saw:

[the Indian railways Government website is down]


LINK: India Rail Info

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“Giveaway of the Day” – Download Licensed Software for Free Everyday

People generally tend to look for pirated versions of software that are available for download from torrents and tons of other resources.

An interesting website I came across recently is Giveawayoftheday.com which provides a licensed copy of a particular software everyday for download.

Each day you will find a new software available for download for 24 hours. This is a completely legitimate service and the giveaway is provided with prior permission from the publishers of the particular software.

The software which this website provides for download range from audio editing, audio/video conversion, up to alternatives/add-ons to MS-Office, office utilities etc. You can check their previous Giveaways till today here.

You can add Giveaway of the Day to your RSS feed, or get email updates everyday as well.

Few things to remember:

  • A particular software is available for download only for a period of 24 hours and cannot be downloaded later.
  • You cannot re-install a particular software after a PC crash or install the program on another PC after the giveaway day is over.

Link: Giveaway of the Day

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Encode information about yourself in a Barcode!

With the rise of retailing, came the rise of the now familiar bar-code. The black and white bars of differing widths, can encode a certain amount of information. This information in shops is usually prices and serial numbers for more efficiency. On tickets a barcode might be used to counter black marketeers.

Barcode yourself is a web tool with which we can create our personal barcode with information like age, gender, location.

Barcode yourself features

  • The website basically allows entering some vital personal information like your gender, age, country, height and weight.
  • Then this information is taken and a barcode is generated.
  • I had the options of downloading this bar-code as an image on my computer or evening getting a printout.

With Phones that can read bar-codes and even create them, such tools can be quite useful to encode details without being to obvious.

Try out Barcode Yourself and create your own unique barcode. It is created by Scott Blake, a bar-code enthusiast and artist. Do drop in your comments.

Link: Barcode Youself

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Trunk.ly – Organize and find all your shared links on Facebook, Twitter, Delicious

A few months ago, I came across a link about King Arthur and his Knights around the round-table. As I work for rtCamp, a company that believes in the round-table philosophy, I shared this link with my colleagues on Twitter.

Actually, I was not sure if it was Twitter or Facebook. Unfortunately I had not saved it on Delicious at that point of time and now I was having a tough time finding this link.

I came across Trunk.ly, a website which allows organizing and searching of all the links that you might have shared on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and even Google Reader.

Trunk.ly Features

  • Sign up and create an account. Registration is free.
  • Once I created the account, I had to connect my Twitter and Facebook account with Trunk.ly. I could also link up my Delicious and Google Reader accounts to Trunk.ly. 😉
  • Once that was done, a simple search for round table showed me link I had shared long ago (see image below).

I share many links on Facebook and Twitter. Because of the nature of these two website, the links I share can differ vastly. But after months things seem to merge and I might not know how to look up for that odd link I had shared. This is where Trunk.ly is going to be a big help.

Do try out Trunk.ly and drop in your comments about it.

Link: Trunk.ly