Captchas are problematic. Traditional captcha solutions have been a failure so far. Below is one of the more user friendly solutions I have come so far
Post Category → General
Usability: Delete Confirmations Done Right
Here is a great way of implementing delete confirmations in web app interfaces. It’s intuitive and usable. It’s done within the same “delete” button but with an extra click. This is how it works, you click once on the button and it will change its state to confirmation button, you click again to confirm deletion.
It’s way better than the overlay popups in the middle of the screen or other too creative ways that go counter-intuitive to the usability of the web app.
It’s from Zapier.com, kudos to them for making their UI user-friendly.
Bookurve – Amazon books, cheaper with free shipping to Malaysia
If you are an avid book reader in Malaysia and often purchase books from Amazon, you must already know how much the shipping fees are pain in the neck. Bookurve, a local startup that was founded by my friends Hossein and Lian Shen is addressing this issue.
Value proposition of their startup is simple;
- Give access to wide selection of books (almost any books sold at Amazon is available on Bookurve)
- At a cheaper price (usually 20-40% cheaper than Amazon)
- With free shipping if you order above RM25 (for West Malaysia)
They have taken few pivots to reach to their current business model. And I’m optimistic about it, as it’s working pretty good for them.
Last week I tried out their service (mainly to see the end-to-end customer journey and provide feedback) and ordered my first book, received it few days back and couldn’t be happier 🙂
Give it a try..
Website: www.bookurve.com
Getty Images – Millions of Free Stock Images for Bloggers
Largest stock photography site Getty Images has recently made a major change to its licensing options. As a result, big bulk of its 35 million image library is now free to use for bloggers and internet publishers.
Below is how it will look when you embed an image from Getty Images to your blog or website. As part of the image, at the bottom, there will be a branding at the left corner – Getty Images’ logo will be displayed. And at the bottom-right, there will be social sharing and re-embed buttons.
This makes it very easy for us – bloggers – to find the right image for our blog posts.
You can search for images that are available to embed here.
How to Watch Netflix and Hulu Outside of US
Netflix and Hulu are popular VOD (Video On Demand) services in the United States. Unfortunately it takes ages for these services to come to countries like Malaysia. Spotify took more than a year after it launched its services in the US in July 2011.
Luckily, with little bit of tweaks here and there, you can watch these US restricted services anywhere in the world. In this post, I will cover how this can be done. You don’t have to be technical person to do this.
1. Get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)
What this means is that, you connect to a server that is based in the US, and all your connections to sites like Netflix and Hulu and the internet in general will be treated as if your computer is located in the US. That is because, you will be connecting to internet via the US server and not directly from your own computer which has a Malaysian IP address for example.
Free vs Paid VPNs
There are a lot of free VPNs out there. However you need to be cautious when you are using these free services. Because you wouldn’t know if they are really secure and private as they claim to be. Or some of the services could be setup with a malicious intent – that is to steal people’s data. For this reason, while you are connected to VPN, never ever do online banking or check your emails or login to Facebook etc. Especially, when you are using the free services.
Another disadvantage of the free VPN services, since they are free, many people will be using them. Therefore, the connection might not be very stable as the bandwidth gets clogged and connection might get disconnected often. This will definitely spoil your Netflix experience.
Below we will cover three types of VPNs; Continue reading
How to Backup All Your Instagram Photos
In light of the latest brouhaha over the Instagram Terms of Service, this might be a good time for you to back up all your Instagram photos. Just to be safe, you know!
Below I will address two ways to backup your Instagram pictures; 1 – your existing Instagram pictures and
2 – a way to auto-backup all your future Instagram pictures as well.
Backing up all your existing Instagram photos
Instaport is a great way to backup all your existing Instagram photos. It’s very simple to use, all you need to do is to connect using your instagram login and all your Instagram pictures will be zipped and ready for you to download.
Website: http://web2.instaport.me
How to auto backup all your future Instagram Pictures
Using two great tools, IFTTT and Dropbox, you can auto backup all your future Instagram photos to your Dropbox as they are posted by you in your Instagram account. I have previously blogged about ifttt here. Continue reading
Education 3.0 – New Way of Learning [updated]
I really like the latest developments in the online education/learning field. Some of the startups are really creative and changing the traditional boring means to learn with more fun, gamified, self-learning online resources. On these sites, you will not only be able to learn, but also contribute to the community if you are good in certain subject fields. This is a great way to harness the benefits of crowdsourcing.
Below, you will find some of these websites:
Code Academy
Codecademy is an interactive and fun way to learn coding. By asking you to type set of words and answers to questions, it will involve you in a two-way communication. By the time you realize, you will be coding and understanding the concepts of object oriented programming. It also employs social elements to the site, so that you can learn together with your friends.
Website: http://www.codecademy.com
Khan Academy
Khan Academy has a huge collection of 2700+ free videos. And it’s a work of one man, Salman Khan. What started of as a casual online tutoring sessions for his relative’s kids, turned out to be one of the largest non-profit educational organizations in the world.
He has MBA from Harvard, he has three degrees from MIT: a BS in math and a BS and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science. His website is mainly popular for his maths videos, which are easy to understand and appealing to school kids. You can read more on Khan’s story at the following sites; Money.CNN, Wired, and SiliconPrairieNews.
Website: http://www.khanacademy.org
TreeHouse
Treehouse is a fairly new website that concentrates on providing instructional videos on Web Design, Web Development and iOS Development. As a part of its teaching method, it uses ‘badges’ similar to what FourSquare does, you will get a badge for answering questions correctly. Continue reading
FastCopy – transfer large files fast
Since getting hdd media player with 650GB of disk space I have been doing some large data transfers. But Windows operating system does a terrible job in transferring large files especially to external hard disks. It hangs, it prematurely terminates the transfers, files get corrupted… you name it.
One way to do large file transfers is using MSDOS’ xcopy command, but it can get troublesome using MS Command Prompt especially when you do not know the commands.
Luckily there is a better way. FastCopy (freeware) (see screenshot) does the same what xcopy does, and even faster. Since it doesn’t use the cache of OS at all, other processes (applications) won’t be affected (i.e become heavy or hang) by the transfer.
It can also verify the copied files making sure that you do not have the corrupted files.
Since finding it I have been using it extensively and so far it’s doing a great job. Highly recommend it.
Website: http://www.ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en
Download: FastCopy v1.98
TinEye – Searching for images the other way
TinEye is an image search engine that employs image identification technology rather than keywords – you upload sample image (or give URL of the image) and the search engine will find for you images that has the similar shapes, concepts, characteristics.
The results can be the same image, modified version of the image or a different image altogether as seen below. Also, the naming of the images do not really matter in this case as long as they match in appearance.
If you want to see more examples of search results, see cool searches page.
Additionally they have iPhone app which allows you to search for products using your mobile phone’s camera. Just take a picture of the product to start searching for product info and reviews. Cool Stuff!
Website: http://tineye.com
Four Useful Ways to use Google effectively
We use Google everyday, but how many of us use it effectively? As you know Google has many search features but nobody uses all the features fully. Usually a typical Google user would just type words in the search box and scan the results. But this is not the most effective way to find something.
I would like to cover some of the most important search rules in this post. They are simple rules but when used correctly, will get you the gems in the search results.
1. Searching by phrase
By default when you search Google it will show you the results that have the keywords that you searched for, as long as those words are mentioned in the page url, page title or page content it will show up in the Google results. For example searching cool CSS tools would display results that have these three keywords. Results might look like this:
However when you put your keyword between quotes ” “, the results will show only the pages that have all three words together (eg: “Cool CSS Tools“)
2. Search by filetype (i.e pdf, doc, exe..etc)
This is a great way to find resources, especially if you are looking for specific file types. For example typing Introduction to Investment:pdf in Google and hitting search will return (some) results in PDF format. Why some only? Because it is possible that there might be no pdf files for the search-term that you have just entered.
3. Finding Word Definitions
When you are searching for some definition you can just type deine:SEARCHTERM and google will display the definition of that word. For example typing define:www and hitting search will show lots of definitions from various sites for the word WWW, see screenshot below.
Extra Tip: -word +word
When you use minus_and_keyword like this -cool css tools, Google will only show the results (pages) that do not have words cool on it. All the pages that have cool word in it will be dropped. That means Google will only display CSS Tools related pages that do not contain Cool word on them.
As for the plus sign before the word, it will find pages that have that particular word. Eg: +Cool CSS Tools, this will show pages that have Cool keyword on them.
Your favorite feature
These tips should be enough to use Google effectively. If you have your own favorite feature that you use often, share with us in comments.
All Google SE Features http://www.google.com/help/features.html