Send Files from the Desktop to your Android Phone via QR Codes

iSendr, as you may recall, is a pretty neat web-based service to help you send files really fast.

Unlike other file transfer services, the unique thing about iSendr is that you don’t have to upload your files to a third-party web server from where the recipient may download them. Here, the transfer happens directly between your two computers and there are virtually no restrictions on file sizes.

From Desktop to Mobile Phone

The iSendr service has recently been upgraded to let you send files directly from your desktop to your Android mobile phone with the help of QR Codes.

It works something like this – you initiate a file transfer session from your desktop and iSendr will provide a QR code on the screen that you can scan* to complete the file download on your mobile phone.

While iPhones and most other smartphones can read QR codes, the iSendr app is written in Flash and will therefore only work on the newer Android phones that have the Flash player.

[*] You may either use the Google Goggles App or the Barcode Scanner to read QR codes on your Android mobile phone.

Related: Send Web Pages from Desktop to Mobile

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Prevent Unnecessary Printing of Docs with WWF

The signature of your email reads – “Please consider the environment before printing this email” – but some of your colleagues don’t seem to care. What do you do next to discourage them from printing email attachments and other useless stuff?

WWF, the organization that is focused on the conservation of our environment and wild-life, have come up with a unique idea to prevent such “casual” users from sending print commands.

They have created a new file format called WWF that is exactly like PDF except for the print functionality. That is, a document saved as WWF can be read inside any PDF reader but the person won’t be able to print it.

To get started, install the WWF Software and then use “Save as .WWF” while saving your documents, emails, web pages, etc. The software is currently available for Mac only though the Windows version is expected to become available soon.

Technically, the WWF format is just another PDF file but one that cannot be printed out. If you have a PDF writer installed on your machine already, you may check the “disable printing” option while creating PDFs and it will also have a similar effect.

Also see: Ways to Reduce Printing Costs

Thanks Myrtille.

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Start a YouTube Video at any Specific Time

Do you want to share the most interesting part of a YouTube video with your contacts without wasting their time?

YouTube URLs have long supported the “time” parameter that lets you link directly to any specific time of a video. For example, if you open the following YouTube URL in your browser, the video playback will start at the 1 minute 22 second mark and not from the beginning.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=tUIuTkjY#t=1m22s

What has changed then? Earlier you had to add the “t” parameter to YouTube URLs manually but now you may do that more easily using the contextual menu itself.

While watching a video on YouTube, just right click anywhere inside the video player and select the option that says “Copy Video URL at Current Time” – the copied URL will now include the “t” parameter pointing to the current location of the video.

This however won’t work with YouTube short URLs (like youtu.be/tUIuTkjY#t=1m22s) and, though you can specify any start time, there’s currently no way to end the YouTube video playback at a certain time.

Related: Visit my YouTube Channel

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Bandwidth Limits in Dropbox

The other day I shared how you may use Dropbox as a CDN to host the static content of your WordPress site. That will not only improve the performance of your website, because you are now using a CDN, but will also decrease the bandwidth requirement of your own web server since some of the files are getting served through Dropbox.

Dropbox provides nearly 2.5 GB of free storage space and that is obviously more than enough to host all the images, CSS and other static files of most websites. However, there’s a caveat you should be aware of. 

Bandwidth Limits for Public Folders in Dropbox

If you have a low-traffic site, the above solution may work without issues but for everyone else, it may not always be a good idea to use Dropbox as a file hosting service.

That’s because Dropbox imposes certain bandwidth limits on files in the Public folder and if you exceed that limit, the URLs of your public file may be temporarily disabled thus returning a 404 error to your visitors.

According to Dropbox support, public links for free accounts may not use more than 10GB of bandwidth per day while that limit is 250GB per day for paid Dropbox accounts. The links are automatically suspended if any of your files exceed that limit.

For comparison, let’s say you have a one page website hosted on Dropbox and the entire weight of all the images, CSS and other static files served through that page is around 400 kb. That means the page should have less than 25k impressions in a day for you to stay within the Dropbox limit.

And if another site decides to hotlink to your static images, it may exhaust your “free bandwidth” quota even sooner.

Thank you Ashish Mohta for the tip.

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Prevent Unnecessary Printing of Docs with WWF

The signature of your email reads – “Please consider the environment before printing this email” – but some of your colleagues don’t seem to care. What do you do next to discourage them from printing email attachments and other useless stuff?

WWF, the organization that is focused on the conservation of our environment and wild-life, have come up with a unique idea to prevent such “casual” users from sending print commands.

They have created a new file format called WWF that is exactly like PDF except for the print functionality. That is, a document saved as WWF can be read inside any PDF reader but the person won’t be able to print it.

To get started, install the WWF Software and then use “Save as .WWF” while saving your documents, emails, web pages, etc. The software is currently available for Mac only though the Windows version is expected to become available soon.

Technically, the WWF format is just another PDF file but one that cannot be printed out. If you have a PDF writer installed on your machine already, you may check the “disable printing” option while creating PDFs and it will also have a similar effect.

Also see: Ways to Reduce Printing Costs

Thanks Myrtille.

View the original article here

Flowchart – How to Make Money on the Internet

Give it some time and this complex but neat flowchart from Fast Company will make lot of sense. There’s life beyond Google AdSense.

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Google’s 2010 Zeitgeist Video is Up!

Google’s 2010 Zeitgeist site is not up yet but they already have a video on YouTube capturing events and moments that the world searched for during 2010.

Very nicely done! I also like the way they’ve integrated these events with the various Google products particularly the South Africa world cup and Gmail’s calling feature.

Update: The site is now available at google.com/zeitgeist2010.

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Wolfram Alpha Can Answer Complex Questions

Wolfram Alpha is smart and here’s some more proof to support that.

If you are to find the historic price of Apple stock on the day when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was born and that too in your local currency, it will require several hops.

You’ll have to visit Zuck’s Wikipedia entry to know his birth date, then to Yahoo! Finance for the APPL stock price and finally to Google to perform currency conversion.

Wolfram can answer such a complex question with a single query written in natural English without requiring you to search anything. Awesome! [via Facebook]

View the original article here