Google Reader - RSS / Atom feed reader

"Firefox taught me what RSS is, Google reader made me addicted to it"

http://reader.google.com

for those who dont know what rss or atom is, i would put it is simple terms.
many of us like to browse sites with dynamic content like blog, news, forums etc.
the problem is that many times your go to your favourite site only to find out that there is nothing new for you to read.

Google Reader makes it easier to keep up with your ever-expanding reading list of content from across the web. You can:
* Automatically get the latest news and updates from your favorite sites.
* Sort your reading list based on what's most relevant to you.
* Organize what you read with labels and stars.
* Quickly share interesting items with friends via email or by blogging them, directly from Reader.

it is an ultimate timepass, i am currently using readymade feeds folder provided by google, and i can skim thru loads of info in lesser time. i have added feeds from my favourite linux podcast too.

whenever something new is released, i come to know it without going to homepages of each and every site.

Wordweb v5.2 - free offline english dictionary and thesaurus

i use this dictionary on my desktop as it is free, has less memory footprint, and it can lookup words from any program.

http://wordweb.info/free/

WordWeb is a one-click English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows that can look up words from in almost any program. It works off-line, but can also look up words in web references such as the Wikipedia encyclopedia. Features of the free version include:

Definitions and synonyms
Proper nouns
Related words
Pronunciations

150 000 root words
120 000 synonym sets
Look up words in almost any program

NOTE: according to the licensing agreement, you can use it for free only if you take at most two commercial flights in a year :-P
seriously it is not a joke. have a look at this link for verification
http://wordweb.info/free/licence5.html

PDF2word conversion - various free methods

i went through a lot of pain when i wanted to edit a pdf file for free.
it started off as a trivial task and soon turned into a complete case study.

if i have to use cracked software, then the choices are:

1. Adobe PDF Acrobat professional
2. Foxit pdf editor
3. Able2extract
   

in order to do it for free, these are the methods i came up with.

1. www.zamzar.com (online conversion)
2. Free PDF to Word Doc Converter v1.1
3. Microsoft Office Document Imaging - most robust method, worked on all input samples
   

1. zamzar.com - online solution
this is a wonderful site which offers any to any file format conversion for free, and the resulting output would be emailed to you.

http://www.zamzar.com

output was satisfactory for me, but size of output was too high, and editability was not up to the mark.
this happened because every image in the word document was treated as full page size image anchored to the page background.
as a result of this, editing text was easy, but moving pictures was too difficult.
coming to output file size, it about 15 times the input file size.

2. Free PDF to Word Doc Converter v1.1 - free-of-cost software
it is an awesome pdf to word converter software provided to the end user free. probably this is the first attempt to provide this kind of facility to windows user free of cost. currently the issue with this software is that the output text is not 100% accurate. there are many typos.
http://www.hellopdf.com

Microsoft Office Document Imaging - a tool in proprietary software Microsoft Office 2003
this trick works on machines that have MS Office 2003 installed on their systems. office suite has a tool called Microsoft Office Document Imaging. this tool does all the trick. this is the procedure:

1. take any pdf, press the print button, choose MS Office document image writer as printer, and then print
2. output file is and .mdi file, and it is automatically opened with microsoft document imaging tool.
3. goto Tools > "Send text to word"
4. check the option "Maintain pictures in output" and press OK
5. if you get a popup saying that OCR needs to run for this step, say yes to it
6. the output file would be an html file opened in microsoft word
7. save it as a word document(.doc)
8. your output would be most accurate in terms of layout, formatting, and filesize.
   

PDFCreator - converts anything printable to pdf - free / open source software

PDFCreator v0.9.5 is THE software i use whenever i need something in pdf format.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

PDFCreator easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
i personally use it as it is very robust, free, open source.
by saying robust i mean that it gives desired output on wide variety of images and documents.

ReCAPCHA - an OCR technique with human touch

i came across this wonderful site which has dual purpose, providing free CAPCHA service to small websites and digitizing old text books.

http://recapcha.net

OCR means optical character recognition. recognizing text inside an image as electronic text.

CAPCHA is the image code that comes in registration form while opening new email account and the person has enter the letter contained in that image.

OCR is basically used to convert scanned documents into electronic text. however, this algorithm is not 100% perfect. when OCR fails, RECAPCHA does the trick by asking humans to recognize difficult to read words

RECAPCHA is a free service, can be used for timepass, their api can be used in any site to improve authentication level.
simple is example is that of a blog which is littered by spam comments. to stop this, recapcha can be used.

a GUIDE to real programmer

i wanted to share a nice link i came across.

http://www.sorehands.com/humor/real1.htm

it is funny for normal people, but i think the person who wrote it was serious about it.
looking from the perspective of a coder who worships programming, and looks at it as an art, this article is quite serious.