How I work – 3 – Irfanview

How I work – 3 – Irfanview

IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREE graphic viewer for Windows 9x, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003 , 2008, Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.  Extremely light and easy to instal (www.irfanview.net) and does not interfere with any other software.

It is designed to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals. Apart from viewing a large array of Graphic Files, it also allows you to view multiple video and audio formats. If you download the plugins also, it gives you various other options which you can explore at leisure.

In addition to viewing files, it has an elementary photo editing option, which allows you to crop files, change the brightness / contrast, etc. If you want to resize your files, you could do it one at a time or in Batch Mode. This feature is extremely useful for resizing multiple files before you email them or upload them on your favourite photo album like picasa or flickr.

I find it extremely useful for my day to day photo handling – so will you !

How I work – 4 – Google Calendar

How I work – 4 – Google Calendar

If you are a regular user of GMail (425 million active users – why not you ?), I have a bunch of productivity tools lined up for you. One of the most used is the Google Calendar. It helps you organize your life seamlessly !
Simple Calendar options are there by default. You can also set it to send you SMS reminders for your appointments, on your phone for FREE ! (Don’t ask me how they manage to do it). If someone sends you a mail which has the time date and place for a possible meeting, you have the option to directly add it to your calendar from your Inbox itself – no need to manually add it to your calendar. Recurring appointments and reminders are a breeze. Many more features are inbuilt for you to explore, but then I would run out of space here !  Google Calendar is also now available as an App for download on Android devices – and it remains synced always.

Just try it, I’m sure you will be hooked – don’t tell me you were not warned !

Write to me at yazdi@on-lyne.com if you would like to have more GMail productivity tools and I will cover them in my future columns

How I work – 2 – Evernote

How I work – 2 – Evernote

One of my favourite productivity tools is Evernote (www.evernote.com). Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life, using your computer, phone, tablet and the web. You can write notes on any of your devices and they will be automatically synced to all your other devices. If you are in a meeting and taking notes on your tablet or phone, the minute you login to your office / home computer, you will find them there!

The beauty of this elegant piece of software is that it is truly cross-platform. It supports iOS, Blackberry, Windows and Android on Smartphones and Tablets, and Mac OS X, Windows, Safari, Chrome and Firefox on Computers. It just syncs seamlessly.

Your notes could be text, audio, picture notes, check lists or even sketches. So remember everything, access anywhere and find things fassssst. Best of all, it is free to instal on each one of your devices. Free Accounts have a 60MB upload limit, per month, but I have never even reached half of it in any month. My current favourite. No gifts of Diaries for me next New Year !

Solve Crosswords easily ! www.wordsdomination.com

Dominate in any word game – Scrabble, Crosswords or any other that you may please. That is the simple objective of this simple website.

It works in two modes – simple or crossword. In the simple mode, you just use “?” for one missing letter: pu?zle. Use “*” for any number of letters: p*zle. Or combine: cros?w*d ; and hit the Search Key. Voila ! You have the possible word(s) in front of you. It is that simple. This can be used for Scrabble and other word games, where there are no limitations to the size of the word you are building.

In the Crossword mode, you have a limitation on the number of letters in a word. So you begin with selecting the no.
of letters for the word, enter those letters that you already have in place, and hit the Search Key. You will instantly get the possible word(s) listed on your screen. Then match them with the clues that you already have. And now, you are on your way to becoming a Crossword champ !

So this Sunday, pick up the toughest crosswords available, and with a little bit of help from wordsdomination.com, become  a pro at solving them. And don’t forget to show off your new-found  skills to your friends

Food Food

If you love food you will love zomato.com

Simply stated, zomato is all about food and where you can find the best of it. Just login to the site, type the type of food you like (chinese, punjabi, tandoori) , along with the place where you would like to find it, and voila !  You have a list of restaurants serving that kind of food in that area. You can further filter it based on dine out or takeaway and you can latch in to exactly what you want, where you want !

Zomato seeks to provide you everything that you might want to and need to know about food before you actually take the first bite. From the nukkad wala dhaba to the swankiest restaurants in your town, they provide you all the info you may ever need: menus, reviews, ratings, contacts. Above everything else, they provide you the convenience to reach all restaurants around you.

Currently, restaurants in Mumbai, Delhi,  Bangalore, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai and Ahmedabad are covered and more cities are ready to be covered soon.

So if you are thinking of eating out over the weekend – try www.zomato.com and decide on where to go or what to order, with ALL the information at your fingertips.

Math Aids


Math-Aids.Com is a free resource for teachers, homeschoolers, and parents. You can make an unlimited number of printable math worksheets for children, the classroom or homework practice.

The flexibility and the text book quality of the math worksheets make Math-Aids.Com a very unique resource for people wanting to create and use Math Worksheets.

The worksheets are categorized topic-wise as well as level-wise. Just click on a topic on your left, select the worksheet that you would like, and click “Create Worksheet”. The worksheet is instantly created. If you are not too sure, you can also create the answers along with the worksheet ! You can save or print any no. of worksheets – all for free !

It is an ideal resource for brushing up your math skills. Try it !

Digital Accessible Information System

DAISY (Digital Accessible Information System) digital format assists people who, for various reasons, have challenges using regular printed media. DAISY digital talking books offer the benefits of regular audiobooks, but they are superior because DAISY includes navigation.

Typical audio talking books do not allow the reader to move through the book easily. You can listen from beginning to end, but not much more, resulting in frustration and wasted time.
Electronic content that lacks navigation makes reading slower and less efficient than it has to be.
Navigable DAISY content that has electronic text available, either with or without audio, may permit readers to examine the spelling of words, or search the text, using a software player on a computer. When DAISY full text is available, some software players also offer users the ability to display and highlight the text of the book on the screen.
DAISY books can increase reading speed and improve reading efficiency. With the press of a button, you can jump to the chapter you need. . . faster than the eyes can skim.
The DAISY standard provides flexibility and options never before possible. You can listen to a DAISY book on a computer while reading the text with a braille display. Or you can listen to a DAISY audio book with a special stand-alone player at home or when traveling.
Although the DAISY Standard was developed with books and people with print disabilities in mind, we can envision many applications for it:

  • Lectures that are available as audio and text files simultaneously.
  • Emergency preparedness materials in audio format as well as available to all who really need them.
  • Synchronized text and audio – very valuable in teaching literacy or a foreign language.

Learn, support, and embrace the huge benefits of this technology: Go DAISY ! More details available at www.daisy.org

Digital Photo Frame

We all love to share photos with our loved ones. The camera screen is too tiny and the computer screen too large, and to some, too complicated. And printing photos and sticking them in an album is sooo very outdated these days. We need something in between – enter the digital photo frame !

A digital photo frame is a photo frame that that displays digital photos without the need to print them or use a computer. Digital photo frames are common in 7 inch to 20 inch sizes. Some digital photo frames can only display pictures. Most digital photo frames display the photos as a slideshow and usually with an adjustable time interval. You can even add background music to suit the mood. So, on a single frame you can have several photos (of say a trip, or a navjot or a wedding), which can change every 10 or 15 seconds.
Some advanced models may support  movie clips recorded in a digital camera’s movie mode, MPEG video files and/or MP3 audio.
Digital photo frames can display the pictures directly from a camera’s memory card, though certain frames also provide internal memory storage. Some allow users to upload pictures to the frame’s memory via a USB connection. Built-in speakers are common for playing video content with sound, or just the pics with background music.
Because a digital photo frame’s display is not very flexible, some pictures cannot be displayed in a satisfactory manner. They tend to have thick black borders or somewhat distorted.

But overall, a Digital Photo Frame is a welcome addition to your family gadget collection.

Google Wallet

In the past few thousand years, the way we pay has changed just three times—from coins, to paper money, to plastic cards. Now we’re on the brink of the next big shift.

Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication (NFC).

Google Wallet has been designed for an open commerce ecosystem. It will eventually hold many if not all of the cards you keep in your leather wallet today. And because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will be able to do more than a regular wallet ever could, like storing thousands of payment cards and Google Offers but without the bulk. Eventually your loyalty cards, gift cards, receipts, boarding passes, tickets, even your keys will be seamlessly synced to your Google Wallet. And every offer and loyalty point will be redeemed automatically with a single tap via NFC.

Google Wallet is coming soon. When it launches, you’ll be able to use Citi MasterCards and the Google Prepaid Card with Google Wallet. You’ll be able to tap to pay at hundreds of thousands of merchants. At launch, Google Wallet will be compatible with Nexus S 4G by Google, available on Sprint. Over time, they will be expanding support to more phones.

This is just the beginning, but in time, your phone with Google Wallet will be the one thing that holds everything you need to carry.

Samsung Galaxy SII

The Samsung Galaxy SII is dubbed to be an iPhone killer. And with a 1.2GHz processor, super-slim chassis and feather-light finish, it’s easy to see why.

It is one of the thinnest smartphones on the market at the moment, rivalling the iPhone 4 and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. And, at just 116gms, it is one of the lightest too. The super AMOLED 4.3 inch screen is a delight – looks even better than the iPhone with its vivid colors, but some may find the colors of the iPhone little more natural. The 8.1MP camera with single LED flash takes great pictures and videos for most day to day requirements.

As compared to the iPhone 4, the Galaxy SII has a tad lower screen resolution and has a plastic body. But otherwise, in terms of speed of browsing and customisability, the SII scores over the iPhone 4. Maybe the iPhone 5 will catch up with this later, but as of now, the SII has an overall breezy experience.

The Android Marketplace for the SII has many more free apps than the Apple iOS marketplace. Besides, for the flexibility of the Android system, the ease of replacement of batteries and the simplicity of the entire experience, I would vote for the SII.

Finally, finding your phone is like finding your life partner, you don’t know whether it is the right one until you meet in person. The final choice must be made after holding the phone in your hand — finding out the build quality (sturdiness), the actual speed of launching applications, the ease of use etc.. But, based on the hard specs, Samsung definitely has an edge. And if you are looking for a good smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy SII is going to be top of the line for a while.