Tag: Chrome Extensions

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Select, Copy, Modify Text inside an image using Project Naptha

Have you ever thought if there was a way to select and modify text inside an image? It’s possible now, with just a Chrome extension.

That’s right. With this extension, you can treat text inside image, as normal text. It’s called Project Naptha.

Selecting text inside image

Project Naptha applies OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on all the images in the browser, allowing you to select text and do things like copy, erase, modify, translate and more.

It works as expected, for most images, especially for screenshots and other text embedded images. Apparently, no OCR technology is perfect.

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To use it, just hover your cursor on text in an image, and just start selecting. You’ll see the text highlighted with transparent blue colour. You can then right click and perform some action on the text – like, search text on Google, erase it from image, translate it into other languages and so on.

Even thought it sounds like this extension needs a lot of processing power, it runs just fine. No crashes or memory hogging till now.

It’s only available for Chrome right now. The developer says there will be a Firefox add-on releasing in a few days.

So if you’re on Chrome, head on to Chrome Webstore and try out this nifty extension.

Link: Project Naptha

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Signal for Gmail: Edit emails you receive for better productivity

I came across a nice Chrome extension called Signal that allows users to edit emails that they have received. You might wonder why that is important, but it has it uses. We often use emails and mark them important or label them on Gmail to create a sort of to-do list for ourselves. Signal seems to extend that a little bit more.

Here I have installed the extension on my browser to test it and sure enough get the option to highlight and edit a particular email.

Gmail_Signal_highlight

 

As you can see in the image above, I do not need any other information from this email except the highlighted part. You can see in the image below how the edited email looks like.

Gmail_Signal_edit

As you see the social icons and other unimportant text from the email does not show up.

This is very useful if you are have to summarize a long email into points or for highlighting and saving important parts like dates, addresses, phone numbers and email ids.

Do try out Signal and drop in your comments.

Link: Signal

via (Life Hacker)

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Automatically Manage and Save Email Attachments to Google Drive or Dropbox – MetisMe

My relatives very rarely send me emails except when they want to share photos of the family. Not everyone is comfortable with photos being uploaded and shared on Facebook or Google+. But I prefer to save my attachments on Google Drive (or Dropbox). A single click solution is available as a Chrome extension but I liked MetisMe, which automatically saves attachments from certain address to your chosen cloud service.

MetisMe
MetisMe – automatic rules to send attachments to a cloud service

As you can see in the image above, installing the MetisMe Chrome extension allows me it to sort my attachments. Most importantly I can make quick rules to send attachments from certain email ids to either Dropbox, Evernote or Google Drive.

The service is still not open for public and there is still more work needed on the service. For instance, I found that it was showing me attachments from emails within my spam folder or previously deleted emails in the option called “Attachments Stack”.

If you want pre-launch access to MetisMe, you can use this link.

Try out MetisMe and drop in your comments and views.

Link: MetisMe | Chrome Extension

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Use Time Warp on Chrome to keep yourself focused on work

Time Warp is a productive Google Chrome extension that will help you stay focused. You might have lots of work to do, but you always tend to check your social media accounts’ updates.

Time Warp will help you calculate the amount of time you have wasted, display a quote message or redirect to a productive website. Time Warp is available for free on the Chrome Web Store.

Once installed, you can create “Wormholes”. Wormholes are basically commands that you want to executed whenever you visit a website that you should not.

Once you install Time Warp, you can go to the extension’s Options to create Wormholes. Then you’ll have to click the Time Warp icon at the top right of the Google Chrome browser to enable Time Warp. Once enabled, the icon will turn blue. To disable, click the icon again.

time-warp-chrome

There are three types of Wormholes that you can create :

  1. Redirection : You can create a Wormhole that redirects you to a particular website when you visit a website that wastes your time.
  2. Quotes : You can choose to display a quote whenever you visit a time-wasting website.
  3. Timer : Time calculates the amount of time that you have wasted on a particular website. The Timer will not be reset until you uninstall the extension or delete the Wormhole.

You can also choose where to display your Timer. You can display it at the bottom right, bottom left, top right, top left or at the top of your Google Chrome browser.

Link: Time Warp on Chrome

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ProxMate – Unlock Region Based Videos and Other Web Content

There are times when you can’t watch a YouTube video because that video is unavailable to your country. Proxies can help you watch that video at such times. ProxMate is an amazing tool that proxies the web content for you.

When ProxMate started first, it supported only Hulu, YouTube and Grooveshark. But now, there are lots more services that ProxMate supports. Some of the notable ones are Google Play, Turntable.fm, Vevo, MTV and a lot more. You can check the list of all services at ProxMate official website.

locked-video

ProxMate is available as extension for Google Chrome and as an add-on for Mozilla Firefox. These extensions are pretty simple to install and use. The most important thing is that, they’re free to use! You can easily install this and start accessing those blocked content.

How do proxies actually work? They route you to that particular regional IP address and let you watch the content without any hassle. With ProxMate, you can set up your own proxy server.

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How to Use ProxMate?

  1. Install the ProxMate extension on your Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browser. Download links are available at the bottom of this post.
  2. Once installed, the ProxMate extension icon is added to the top right of your Chrome browser. It is enabled by default.
  3. The package modules are also enabled by default. That is, you can now start browsing for those region blocked content straight away.
  4. If you want to disable this extension for a while, just tap the icon. To enable re-tap.
  5. To disable any package module, right click on the icon, go to “Options” and then un-tick any module.

proxmate-options

You can now watch the blocked YouTube videos, listen to blocked music and a lot more! You can also make Google Play device purchases. Note that you’ll need U.S. address and credit card. If you don’t have them, you can make use of popular services like Shop and Ship, USUnlocked to help you buy.

Links: Google Chrome | Mozilla Firefox

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Auto Refresh Chrome Webpages with Auto Refresh Plus

There are times when we need to constantly refresh a particular webpage just because that webpage is not loading or we want to see new content in that page. Hitting the Refresh button or the F5 button on the keyboard is the probably tiresome. In such cases, extensions like Auto Refresh Plus can be of some help to us.

Auto Refresh Plus is a nifty Google Chrome extension that can refresh a particular webpage for a pre-defined time interval. Auto Refresh Plus is also useful when you want to keep refreshing the page till that page shows some new content or lose some content. This feature is called Page Monitor.

Auto Refresh Plus is available for download on the Chrome Web Store. The extension is really simple to use. On installing, a small icon gets added to the top right of your Google Chrome browser. You can then set instructions with ease like so :

  1. Open the webpage that needs to be refreshed periodically.
  2. Then click on that icon and select the time interval. You can also set a time interval of your own.

auto-refresh-plus

That’s it. It was really simple to configure, right? Once done, that particular web page will continue refreshing automatically. You can now proceed your work with the other tabs. That tab will continue refreshing on it’s own.

Auto Refresh Plus comes with various options. You can enables sounds to notify you when Page Monitor triggers. You can also choose what sound is to be played by inserting the sound URL in the settings section. The settings section also shows options to auto start refreshing and also set a predefined URL to be refreshed.

You might also want to check out Notifycon, an extension that shows notification counts on pinned tabs.

If you are using Firefox, there is an addon that does a similar job.

Link: Auto Refresh Plus on Chrome Web Store

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Hola Unblocker: Faster access to Geographically locked websites

Being open is the basic nature of web. But there’s a lot of restricted material too and that can be pretty annoying.

Web services getting locked to few specific countries – is nothing new. Think of Spotify, Netflix, Hulu etc. If you’re not living in the US, you’re left out. Easiest way to get around this is to use proxies. But proxies can be filled with ads. They can be ridiculously slow, or might be temporarily down.

Hola Unblocker unblocks these blocked sites, in a much faster way and is ad-free.

Hola

So what’s new about this unblocker? Hola doesn’t use proxies. It works in a much different fashion.

It uses peer-to-peer connection, like say BitTorrent, to cache websites. So when you request a webpage, your request is routed through other Hola users’ computers.

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To put it in a simple way, if you’re living in India and access Rdio (which is not accessible in India), your HTTP request is routed through a US Hola user’s computer and so you’ll see the exact same webpage as that person sees.

This indeed means, more data usage for you, but the blocked sites load very fastly. I used it for listening to Rdio and it worked well.

Hola works with many music services, social networks by default. But if your favourite service is missing in that list, try googling for its ‘hscript’ – which is an extension for Hola. For example, here’s the hscript for Rdio.

Simplest way to use Hola is to install it as a Chrome extension, or Mozilla add-on if you prefer. There are native apps for Windows and Android too.

Link: Hola Unblocker

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Download Images in Bulk with a Single Click on Chrome

Ever wanted to download a collection of images from a particular webpage and end up wasting your time downloading each and every image individually? A Chrome extension named “Image Collection Extension” will be helpful.

It is an easy to use extension that quickly scans a particular webpage that you are on and gives you options to download them. There are numerous options to download. You can choose to download those images either to your local hard disk drive directly or choose to upload those images direct to your cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and SkyDrive.

How it works:

  • Install the extension and a new icon gets added to the right side of the address bar on Google Chrome.
  • Lookup any webpage with a few images and then click on that icon, it will display all the images in that particular webpage in a pop-up.
  • You can choose to download them individually or download them in bulk.

image-collector-extension

  • Some images can also be excluded from the bulk select.
  • The extension can be connected to SkyDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox. The options are on the right hand side.
  • The settings section of this extension gives you various options. You can filter the images based on certain image extensions, filter out images based on certain keywords and do a lot more! 

In case you are exclusively using Google Drive, then I would recommend Google’s Save to Drive Extension for Chrome.

Link: Image Collection

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Create shortcuts for text phrases on Chrome with Popchrom

Chrome is my favourite browser and it has a great deal of options to improve productivity. Here are some of my favourite productivity tips for Chrome. Because I am using the browser a lot for writing blog post and answering email, I found Popchrom a really good extension. It allows me to create shortcuts for text phrases. For example, I have set the shortcut “DW” to expand into “Devils’ Workshop” the full name of this blog.

Chrome - shortkeys expansion

How it works:

  • Install the Popchrom extension on your Chrome browser.
  • Then look up its options and add your customized shortcuts. There are some default ones like “sy” expands to “Sincerely yours” and “today” expands to the current data.
  • Once you type in the short form, just hit “Ctrl + Space“. This is a default and can be changed according to your preferences.
  • Usually, it makes sense to have some very common short forms for words or full sentences you might typing out too many times.

Additional Tip: If you sending similar emails all the time, you might want to check out Gmail’s canned response which can even be used from your Android phone.

Try out Popchrome and drop in your comments.

Link: Popchrom

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Convert Web Pages to PDF and Send to Google Drive

PDF have survived the the post-PC world. As a matter of fact, I think we will read a lot more PDFs because there will a lot more tablets being sold. Most websites do not publish content that really needs to be saved as a PDF file, but it might be necessary if you want to save a tutorial or a long 5000 word article.

As I accessing my files on different computers I tend to use Google Drive. Here is a handy Chrome extension I came across that converts a HTML page into PDF and saves it to your Google Drive.

HTML to PDF Save Google Drive

How it works:

  • Download and install the “Send to Google Docs” extension on your Chrome browser. The extension will show up a new icon next to the Chrome omnibar (address bar).
  • Now while looking up a website, just click on the icon.
  • The HTML page is converted into a PDF document. It opens a preview within Google Drive.
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Some Negatives:

You have to be logged into your Google Account for this extension to work. Ofcourse that means we are not sharing our Google ID and passwords with a 3rd party, so it is not exactly a but drawback.

The files are stored by default in the root directory of Google Drive. Unfortunately it does not have the option of choosing a default folder to send the PDF to.

Also if you like PDF files and search for them try out these 5 tips for searching PDFs online.

Do drop in your comments.

Link: Send to Google Docs (Chrome)