As Life Goes Digital

Folks in US (or UK) when calling customer service we get impatient hearing all ten plus options of what to dial for different functions. Most of the time we need to get in touch with a customer service representative to talk and resolve the issue at hand. GetHuman.com (to remember the site easily the domain name is - Get + Human ) fills this need. It has collected information of secret codes and phone numbers of more than 800 companies in US. It is a huge search able database of customer service numbers and single click or very minimal touch-tone combination that will get you speaking with a real human being.

This way we can avoid long prompts and save our time and money in waiting to receive updated estimated wait times from automated CRM systems. The GetHuman lets users rate the secret phone numbers and codes so that quality of the codes to get to human is more refined. If there are three stars or more than it is more probability that number and codes work.


This is holiday season and when we buy online we need to have this list handy to get to rep in less time. Here are Amazon customer service numbers from "gethuman" -

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Labels: Customerservice, Telephonenumber, tips

Not happy with the normal quality of the Youtube cricket videos? Follow this simple trick and you can watch high resolution cricket Youtube videos.

Yuvraj six sixers video normal quality Youtube video link is here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s73tSpiHhzw and the trick for high quality videos is just append &fmt=18 to the url so it becomes high quality Youtube cricket video - here is high res link - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s73tSpiHhzw&fmt=18

You can watch this way any Youtube video in highquality by appending the string &fmt=18.

If you want the same behavior with Embeded Youtube videos in a web page then follow this procedure -
Append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 to the param link and src link in the embed tag.

Here is high resolution cricket embeded video -

Labels: India, tips, videos

My Hotmail account gets nearly 30 to 50 spam email daily, I've to browse my junk mail folder often to make sure I don't miss any important mail that Hotmail marks it as junk.

This has become a wasteful exercise sucking out time that can be put to some other good use. Most of the junk mail these days are from Paypal, eBay, Bank Of America (my bank) and even Obama election mails - all of course are phishing emails tricking us to steal our identity theft.

Every time I get such spam email I go to Google and search for subject and body of the spam email. Most of the time users post and give good feedback of whether a mail is spam email or not.

Here is another simple way to check for spam email

The following email is in my junk folder :



A free online email address checker is available at this location. If you enter the valid mail address then the site displays appropriate icon.

A valid email address looks like this - check the "valid" text in the image

A in-valid email address looks like this - check the "Not valid" text in the image


This helps us to filter out spam emails.

Do you know of any other tips to filter spam mail

Labels: tips

Thrillist is a free daily email on the newest food, nightlife, travel, entertainment and gadgets. Some of them you may not know that they exist near you is the whole idea behind "Thril+List" website. It is mostly targeted for men and be cautious that sometimes Thrillist's daily emails may contain "adult themes" and may not be appropriate for everyone.



If Thrillist is for men, Dailycandy is for women which send mailing list focusing on women's daily fashion and culture. Dailycandy is part of Comcast family now.



The Thrillist email list must be huge that they are rejecting to sell ad space on their website and allow only email advertising.

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Labels: tips

GM introduced new educational experience game - MR. Stephen's Engine Shop for kids between 5th and 8th grade. This is educational game to identify car engine pictures with their names I doubt that every one who drives a car knows what are all the engine parts ? If dealer mechanic tells us some specific part needs change, now after taking the game at least we will have some idea what he is talking about and avoid paying too much for the part by not buying it from the dealer.

More than that it is just to increase car general knowledge. The car here is Corvette.

Here are parts from round 1 of the game : Connecting Rod, Drive Belt, Super-Charger, Fuel Rail, Oil Pan, Head gasket etc etc.

Labels: Automobile, Cars, tips

The percentage of free applications are decreasing in App store with Apple tightening the acceptance of some apps from the developers in the past.

Here is the feed of all new applications from Apple's App Store. Click the app to expand to get to know more details of the app. The date shows how recent is the app.



Buxr - the deal site had listed three free applications from Apple's app store - Don't square , Kinwits and Starquake

Here is another link to tons of free App store games and apps. (
http://idwn.blogspot.com/)

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Labels: App Store, Apple, Deals, free, IPhone, ITunes, tips

Marketshare data shows that browser share of Internet explorer is shrinking where as Firefox and Safari are gradual winners in the browser wars. Firefox 3.0 increased its share to almost 20% where as Safari is at 6.5%. Internet explorer lacks innovation as Firefox which has so many add-ins that made life easy in browsing internet. The performance is much better on Firefox though at the cost of consuming more CPU time. We have to wait and see how Microsoft takes up these challenges in their IE 8.0 release.

Here is the data from December 2007 to October 2008 :



Increase in Safari browser share is an interesting risk taken by Apple. The versions are released as Apple's Software Update service on Windows. The update has been pushed to millions of Windows users of Apple's other software products, like iTunes. This is first time that Apple's Software Update service is used to delivery of new products. In the process Apple probably annoyed some users. But the tactics of Apple worked by gaining browser market share.

Labels: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, tips

Federal Government released its first-ever Physical Activity Guidelines for 2008 that provides scientific guidance to help people aged 6 and older improve their health through appropriate physical activity. Based on your age here are few quick to refer guidelines from the website :

Children and Adolescents (aged 6–17)

* 1 hour (60 minutes) or more of physical activity every day.
* At least 3 days per week. Muscle-strengthening and bone-strengthening activity on at least 3 days per week.

Adults (aged 18–64)

* 2 hours and 30 minutes a week of moderate-intensity, or 1 hour and 15 minutes (75 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity,
* Muscle-strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups performed on 2 or more days per week.

Older Adults (aged 65 and older)

* Follow the adult guidelines.
* Do exercises that maintain or improve balance if they are at risk of falling.

For all individuals, some activity is better than none. People without diagnosed chronic conditions (such as diabetes, heart disease, or osteoarthritis) and who do not have symptoms (e.g., chest pain or pressure, dizziness, or joint pain) do not need to consult with a health care provider about physical activity.
Adults With Disabilities

Labels: exercise, health, tips

“Earthcaller” is a PC-to-phone service that allows users who have access to internet to call any phone in the United States from anywhere in the world for free. Someone in India can call US number for free using this service.

The requirement is that Earthcaller works with MS Internet Explorer browser only . There is no hassle of downloading any software, Earthcaller instead takes advantage of Active X technology that makes it possible to make call from PC to any phone in US.

Some basic user friendly features makes it easy for users -
> Earthcaller Speed Dial using one-click dialing
> For high quality calls Network speed test to confirm the Internet connection speed
> Storage of frequently called numbers in Contacts list
> Microphone and headset volume check
> A single sign-in for access to other Jaduka Labs applications and widgets.

Labels: free, global calls, tips

In simple terms this is what Google is doing - If you are a photographer and take a picture with your creativity and with some concept that you have in your mind. Google does the rest of the job for you in searching that image to find clues of any text embeded in that image may be say like "road signs" or human readable text for indexing.

Until now Google did indexing of only text saved PDF documents only and with this technology any pdf document saved as image can be indexed with the help of its open-source OCRopus technology.

OCRopus development is sponsored by Google and is free document analysis and OCR system released under the Apache License. OCRopus uses HP developed Tesseract for character recognition but has its own layout analysis system that is optimized for accuracy. It is intended for high-throughput, high-volume document conversion efforts with image preprocessing and layout analysis; it chops up the scanned document before passing it to Tesseract for line-by-line or character-by-character recognition.Currently, OCRopus uses Tesseract as its only character recognition plugin, but others are expected to be added in the future.

The benefits are many with this technology imaging those dusted government agencies years of paper data that can be scanned and indexed by Google.

If you want to try hands-on -- You can download the OCRopus source distribution by following the Downloads link and then follow the installation instructions linked to from the left menu.

Sources:

> code.google.com/p/ocropus/
> wikipedia/OCRopus
> 2007 article of arstechnica.com/hands-on-with-googles-ocropus-open-source-scanning-software
> sites.google.com/site/ocropus/

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Labels: Google, OCRopus, Opensource, tips

There are 550 plus songs that Amazon is giving as free mp3 downloads.

I sorted the result by release date and found that even future releases are available with the date. Instead of searching the web and doubting if the downloaded mp3s are legal, the Amazon free downloads is a good hassle free alternative. May be that all good numbers are available at Amazon for free.

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Labels: Amazon, Deals, free, tips

It is one more week to the election (Nov' 4 ' 2008) . The online activity increases to find out where our supported candidates stand out as election nears. Keep this list of US 2008 election websites handy. I feel its alternative to TV when one is in office or on road (like some iPhone apps) .

-Google links
> 2008election
> maps/elections
> obama_map
> mccain_videos
> us-voter-info

- pollster
- slate - iPhone App
- fivethirtyeight
- opensecrets
- huffingtonpost, fundrace
- perspctv
- 10000words , presidential-endorsement-map
- Glassbooth
- whatwouldyousaytothepresident
- Smartvoter
- ballotpedia
- vote411/poll finder
- dvice
- electicker2008

Labels: list, McCain, Obama, tips, USElections2008

Many times I personally ran into this problem where a file sent to me (by known person) does not open even though it has some extension type say Bombay.mp3. To root out all those problems here is useful tip from KrazyDad. He uses Hexdump to analyze the file type.

Here is the mapping

File Type - HEX DUMP
MP3 - ID3
WAV - RIFF

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Labels: Fileformat, MP3, tips

Sometimes on computers you don't want to leave the trace of your browsing history which may lead to data breaches. To surf the web in stealth mode, Here is useful script from Hackszine . All you have to do is copy that script in a notepad and save with .js file extension. Every time you open js file that starts the Chrome browser in incoginto mode.

Labels: tips

Devin Griffin got accepted into Wharton business school with two year tuition of 80,000 per year for his MBA paid. Business Week writes a letter to the admission committee by Devin made that possible to consider him for the school's scholarship.

Business schools are an expensive affair with students taking loans and pushing themselves into serious debts of $100,000 and more in the economy where jobs are uncertain after an MBA.

Tips to get free MBA:

1) Students who start their own business and have shown excellent community outreach programs.
2) Some schools automatically select students for scholarships.
3) Think ahead (2 or 3 years) before you start your MBA.
4) Apply for scholarships in the first round of MBA applications.
5) Target scholarships that aim for only Women, country based, and diversity.
6) Demonstrate leadership and highlight the cause.
7) Write out Fellowship that you are seeking.
8) Go to business school where your grades and GMAT score is above average that other students. And
9) Do part time MBA where your employer sponsors Tuition reimbursements. (Remember this type of free MBA comes with a price that a) Some corporations require that employee stay one-year with them after completion of MBA or pay back the tuition. b) May not be getting the full tuition reimbursement and have to pay taxes.

Any other tips you know of to do MBA for free and avoid huge debts ?

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Labels: Business school, BusinessWeek, free, GMAT, Kellogg School of Management, MBA, tips, United States, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

For US phone numbers : This is the age of telemarketers and they will call you no matter you register in "DO NOT CALL REGISTRY" or un list your number from your phone company directory. Many times its a missed call with no voice mails. 800notes is the best site to get info on those strange numbers. Just plug in that missed call number and read the other users comments. To find the caller and the location, Nanpa website - gives you area codes and location.

The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is an integrated telephone numbering plan serving 19 North American countries that share its resources. These countries include the United States and its territories, Canada,Bermuda, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands,Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks & Caicos.

If you are a map person then use Geolocator site

If you need one click result instead of browsing through map or by number then use the basic free service provided by phoneinfosite, Reversegenie and list of sites at phone info

For India phone numbers:


To find out about all details about cell phone number , read this wiki article -

All cellphone numbers are 10 digits long, (normally) split up as OO-AA-NNNNNN where OO is the operator code, AA is the zone code assigned to the operator, and NNNNNN is the subscriber number.

For location by plugging in just the India cell phone number use this site

Labels: tips

Rental Properties : Type of real estate investment Property that ordinarily gains value over time unlike many other real estate investments that may rise and fall quickly and without warning. The problem with any investing property is that far too few people can actually afford to hold and maintain multiple properties over an extended and indefinite period of time while waiting for the value to rise. Many property investors manage to overcome this by renting the properties to tenants during the time when the property values are rising. This allows the tenants to essentially cover the note on the property and makes the venture a little less risky though there are risks involved when dealing with tenants (such as property damage, failure to pay the rent, and possible legal woes-the good tenants generally outweigh the bad).

Some facts about renters in the United States: (Source : MSNBC)

NUMBERS: About 32 percent of U.S. householders are renters, rather than homeowners; the