Extracting Text from a Image

September 1, 2009 | 1 comment

On numerous occasions I have had a need to extract text from an image and have never found a way to be able to do so. Typically I want to get the text of an error message and while, sometimes, ctrl+c will copy the text to the clipboard, mostly it won’t.

I stumbled upon a neat solution the other day using a little know (to me) tool that comes as part of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office Document Imaging is a tool to bring the paper and electronic worlds together by managing the scanning of documents. It also has another trick … Read the rest

Unfuddle for iPhone

August 28, 2009 | 1 comment

I have been using Unfuddle for a while now with a number of my clients. To quote Unfuddle themselves it is a “secure, hosted project management solution for software development teams.”

Depending on your level of membership, which start at free, you get ticketing, time tracking, messages, subversion or git hosting, notebooks and milestone tracking. It is a slick, cost effective, solution that works well and is great for distributed teams, such as those I am working with.

However, there aren’t any mobile optimised screen, so I decided to try and put something together to enable me to get a … Read the rest

Netbook Memory Upgrade

August 22, 2009 | Comment

I decided this week that I would make the only simple upgrade to my netbook and double the memory it has in it from 1gb to 2gb. For this I bought a stick of memory from the ever reliable Crucial for £12.64 delivered. It arrived within a couple of days of ordering and took less than 10 minutes to install (full instructions can be found here).

You can see in the picture on the left the memory in place between the fan and the hard drive. Since then I haven’t had much of an opportunity to have a … Read the rest

GPush for iPhone

August 17, 2009 | Comment

One of the things that iPhone has been missing for me is the ability to push my email to my device. For my business email I have a Google Apps account and it would be really useful to be able to get my emails pushed just as I already can for my calendar and contact entries. Well after a bit of a hiccup GPush is available from the Apps store to do exactly what it says on the tin and push Google mail to an iPhone.

GPush was supposed to be available about a week ago but problems with their … Read the rest

Datz Not Good

August 16, 2009 | Comment

It’s been a while since I have written about Datz, the all you can eat music service. The last time I posted, back in May, it was to give a review based on my early findings looking for favourite music of family and friends. I found it to be hit and miss. I also bemoaned the clunky interface which was difficult and time consuming to use.

After reading the post Datz contacted me to say that a number of my points would be addressed “within the month or so”. That would have been sometime in June and it is … Read the rest

FREETALK Everyman USB Headset for Skype

August 10, 2009 | 2 comments

I have found myself using Skype more and more recently, particularly since some good friends have moved to Australia.

Over the years I have used a number of ways to make Skype calls. I have used the speaker and microphone on my netbook, a VoIPVoice Cyberphone-w handset and a Polycom Communicator.

The laptop only experience is ok but the sound is very tinny. The Cyberphone and the Communicator are both excellent devices but I don’t like holding the handset on long calls, particularly when they are video too and the communicator is really better suited for conference calls and … Read the rest

LAN Cards – Not for Minors

August 8, 2009 | Comment

I have been looking for a network card with wake-on-lan for one of my machines at home. I thought that I would have a look and see what Amazon had and turned up the item shown below.

I was a bit surprised to see this text alongside the product: “Not for sale to persons under the age of 18. By placing an order for this product, you declare that you are 18 years of age or over. This item must be used responsibly and appropriately.”

Could that be because there are all sort of scary things that you can access … Read the rest

Getting Software onto your Netbook

August 7, 2009 | Comment

A friend of mine recently bought a netbook and was wondering how he could install software onto it that he had on CD.

There are a number of ways to achieve this: buy an external usb-CD/DVD drive to plug in, share the disk out from another machine and access across a network or create an image of the disk and transfer this to the netbook.

The former is probably the simplest solution but requires an additional outlay which, quite frankly, is probably not justifiable for the small number of times that you are going to have to do it. It … Read the rest

Free Mp3 Tracks with Future & WH Smiths

July 30, 2009 | Comment

T3 Magazine Subscription Future Publishing and WH Smiths are giving away 10 MP3 tracks via 7digital with selected magazines. The price of a download on 7digital is about 99p per track so 10 tracks are worth just shy of a tenner, although if you buy a complete album you will pay closer to £8.

The cheapest mag I could find doing the offer was T3 at £4 so on the face of it that seems to be a pretty good offer.

Get down to you local WH Smiths now and look for the magazines with a bit of card welded to the back … Read the rest

Free for Free

July 27, 2009 | Comment

FREE by Chris Anderson Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired US, is currently pushing his book Free which is all about the free price point in the modern economy. This picks up on, in part, the freemium model I spoke about recently.

Of course it is difficult to argue that free is the new price point when you are trying to sell a book with a cover price of £18.99. To get around this difficulty Anderson has managed to persuade his publisher that they should give away a limited number of copies of the book in various formats. So right now the … Read the rest