Tze Chuen’s Weblog

Notable changes: Address bar filter thingy seems to be more responsive and less laggy + some cool fade effect for hovering over tab buttons.

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Adblock addon seems to be broken with this beta. Let’s hope an update is being released soon.

Bored of the plain white Gmail theme? Then you should try Gmail Redesigned. With a black and stylish theme, Gmail will never be the same again.

Interested?

1) Install Stylish

2) Install Gmail Redesigned Stylish theme

3) ???????

4) Profit!

In other news, my Gmail account is celebrating its 666th spam mail. Hooray!

Received an email from Internode:

Dear Internode customer,

We have substantial number of service improvements to tell you about.
.
Please visit this web page on the Internode site for the full details:

http://www.internode.on.net/news/2008/04/81.php

This is a summary of the announcements you will find on the web page:

* The Launch of Internode Naked ADSL2+
* Single Service Migration Charge - Reduced
* Premium Usenet Returns! (better then ever before)
* Quota Upgrades to Home and SOHO plans at and above 20Gb, at no
additional cost!
* New Home-Extreme-Starter plan
* Two New Plans for Home ADSL1 (Home-1500-Power15 and Home-High-Power5)
* Three New Business ADSL1 plans - featuring UNLIMITED downloads
* Reduction in the Excess Data Rate on Business ADSL plans
* Changes to the ‘Maximum Price Caps’ on Business ADSL1 plans
* Simplification of NodePhone Pricing.
* New NodePhone Number Ranges
* NodePhone MultiLine Enhancements
* Internode Network to expands into Japan
* Boosting Our International Network capacity via Southern Cross
* National ATUG Award for Internode’s Regional WiMax Network

Best wishes,

The Internode Team
support@internode.on.net

Reading thru the new plans/pricing revealed that my current plan gets an additional 15gb. My ex-housemate would’ve been ecstatic bout this. Poor dude has his net capped already with 3 more weeks to go.

The quota increase will take effect 1st of April, regardless of your rollover date. Ironically, it’s the same day when Left Handed Whoppers were introduced 10 years ago.

And now, gotta find a way to waste my 30+gb quota in 2 weeks.

Photoshop is probably one of the most well known software for the computer. Almost everyone knows what’s it for. Heck, even my grandma has a retouched picture of herself hanging on her walls. She would tell you that the picture was taken 30 years ago. Obviously nobody believed her! ;)

Adobe just launched a free web service called Photoshop Express. It gives you 2GB of free photo storage so you could store all your favorite Yua Aida pictures. Of course, that’s not what made Photoshop Express special, rather it is a web app that allows you to store and do simple edits to your photos. Tasks such as cropping only require a few clicks. If you frequently crop your pictures for your Facebook profile, then Photoshop Express is your best friend. Sure, you can probably do the same task with MS Paint, but Photoshop Express has integration with Facebook, PhotoBucket and Picasa. This means that you can edit your stored photos in any of those mentioned web services right from Photoshop Express!

Here you can see cropping and rotate feature in action. It’s really simple.

Photoshop Express may not be for the expert users, but if you’re someone like me who needs to crop or touch up images every now and then, Photoshop Express is the perfect tool.

However, one thing I didn’t like about Photoshop Express was it didn’t accept PNG files. I mean, come on, how hard is it to support PNG files?

If you wanna try out Photoshop Express, click here.

P/S: Sorry about the poor quality screenshots, looks like I’ll never use Resize ‘Em All again.

Yesterday I received an email from Evernote saying that I was invited to beta test their app. Evernote is an app for both Windows and Mac platforms that allows you to keep both text and image notes in Evernote’s servers. You can then refer back to them when needed.

What attracted me about Evernote was not that it allows you to keep your love letters from your ex-lovers. It was the text in image recognition technology. Initially, I thought that this tech is built into their app. However, after using the app itself I was slightly disappointed because the text in image recognition is actually done server-side, meaning all those tech stuff is actually being done on Evernote’s servers and not right on their app.

How it works is every few minutes your app synchronizes with Evernote’s servers uploading changes (such as additions of new notes). It takes a while before those text in image recognition process is done on your newly uploaded pictures. I’m guessing every few minutes the servers undergoes the process of “tagging” all the newly uploaded images by users. So it’s actually a matter of luck how long it takes for your images to get synced.

However, I don’t think the “few minutes delay” thing matters because the use of this technology is to allow you to search images that contain words that you remember. Unless your memory span is less than a few minutes, then you shouldn’t be worry about this.

This is how Evernote’s Mac app look like.

To test out how Evernote recognizes text in images, I used the “New Snapshot Note” feature and took a quick webcam shot thru my built-in iSight. I took a picture holding up Uncle Toby’s “what I eat for breakfast when I’m running late for classes”.

Right here you can see that it recognizes the word “Apricot” very well and highlights the word Safari-style. Other words that worked was “Uncle”, “Yoghurt” and the first few numbers of best before date. Anything smaller than the word “Apricot” was not recognized. Fair enough, those words are too blurry anyway.

Next, I took a picture of my book shelf with my digital camera and made sure the picture wasn’t too blurry.

As you can see, the smaller words such as “Socks” could be recognized.

Here, you can see that even vertical words can be recognized! This holds true for most of the words that appear on this picture except for those that are half-shadowed.

Just for fun, I typed in all alphabets a to z in the search box to yield all alphabetical results. Here you can see what words were picked up by Evernote’s text in image recognition system. It’s not too bad for a consumer-based product!

Of course, this is just one of Evernote’s many cool features. If you’re interested to know more, head on to www.evernote.com!

P/S: Evernote is currently invitation-only beta.