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Showing posts from May, 2016

How to Extract Email Addresses from your Gmail Messages

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Acme Widgets Inc. has been in business for over 10 years and they have exchanged emails with thousands of customers and suppliers. The email messages are archived neatly in Gmail but most of the email addresses aren’t stored in Google Contacts. The company is now shifting office and they need to inform everyone via email of the office move. The big task ahead is to extract all these email addresses from the Gmail mailbox and download them in a format, like CSV, that can be easily imported into the Google address book or a mailing list service like MailChimp. Introducing Email Address Extractor , a Google add-on that sifts through all email messages in your Gmail account, extracts the email addresses and saves them in a Google Spreadsheet. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts. The Extractor can mine email addresses from a particular Gmail folder (label) or the entire mailbox. You can choose to extract emails of the sender, the recipient(s) and those in the CC list. The a...

How to Identify the Gender of your Twitter Followers

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Do you ever wonder what is the demographics of people who follow you on Twitter. How many of your Twitter friends are men? Or women? Or random colored eggs, people who are either too lazy to change their default avatar or maybe they are Twitter bots . The Graph Search of Facebook can provide deep insights into the demographics of people who are connected with you on the social network. For instance, you can write a natural language query like “ My friends who are older than 30 ” or “ My female friends who live in Delhi ” and the answer will be available instantly. Such granular data is however not available for Twitter users. Who Follows You? Males, Females or Eggs How do you programmatically determine the gender of a person on Twitter? The Twitter API doesn’t provide the gender information but there’s a workaround. You can take the profile picture of a Twitter user, feed it into Siftr’s Vision API and it will detect the gender of the most prominent face in the photograph. Y...

Make Stunning Video Presentations with Spark Video from Adobe

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Adobe Voice has long been my favorite digital storytelling app for making video presentations and photo slideshows on iOS device. All you have to do import your photos, type some text, add your own voice narration and a stunning video is ready for uploading on to YouTube or Facebook. Here’s a video story that our 10-year old made with Adobe Voice. The background music, transitions and other effects are automatically applied by the Voice app to make your video looks both cinematic and professional. I have all good things to say about Adobe Voice except that you need an iPad or iPhone to create videos. Well, until now as Adobe has quietly launched a new suite of web apps that, among other things, will let you use Adobe Voice inside your desktop browser. The suite, known as Adobe Spark, includes tools for creating video stories, magazine-style web pages and typography posters (think of Typorama but for the web). And the price is just right. $0. To get started, go to spark.adobe.com ...

How to Copy an Entire Folder to Another Folder in Google Drive

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Google Drive, launched almost 4 years ago, is an online vault where you can store all your files and documents. It offers nearly all the functionality that you would expect in a file manager app making it easier for you to manage files from within the browser. You can move files between folders, rename files, differentiate them with colors, add text notes for easier lookup and more. However the one piece that is still missing in Google Drive is the ability to copy folders. You can duplicate any file in Google Drive by right-clicking the file and selecting “Make a Copy” but this option is not available for folders. A Google Script exists to copy folders in Google Drive but it is complicated. The option to duplicate folders doesn’t exist in Google Drive How to Copy Folders in Google Drive Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an xcopy (Windows) or rsync (Mac, Unix) like command for Google Drive that would recursively copy everything inside a folder, easily It should not ...

How to Embed Facebook Message Buttons in your Website

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Email has always been the preferred mode for reaching out to people on the Internet. Websites would put their email addresses on web pages and made them clickable hyperlinks using the mailto protocol . Things have changed and while email is still considered important, the new generation is known to prefer instant texting apps like Facebook Messenger over email. For them, writing an email is as boring as creating a résumé. This step-by-step guide explains the various techniques that you can use to easily embed the Facebook Messenger button in your website. When someone clicks the Message Me button, it will directly launch the Facebook Messenger app on their mobile phone or the messenger.com website if they are on the desktop. You can choose to receive messages in your Facebook profile or your Facebook page, if you have one. A: Simple Facebook Messenger Link The default Facebook Messenger button is rendered using JavaScript but you can also write them in pure HTML without requiring ...

How to Delete the Useless Photos in your WhatsApp Automatically

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WhatsApp is probably the largest space hog on our mobile phones. We all have friends and relative who diligently forward us every single motivation quote and meme they’ve received from their own network. Some think it is their duty to wake us with a “good morning” message accompanied with photos of the rising sun or chirping birds. The bigger problem with WhatsApp is that these ‘spam’ messages often originate from contacts who are close to you in real life and thus blocking them would be considered rude. You have an option to mute WhatsApps groups but the downloaded images would still take up precious space on your mobile phone. A simple solution to the problem would be that you open the Photo Gallery app on your Android phone, or use a File Manager app to locate the media folder of WhatsApp, and delete the entire folder containing those WhatsApps images. But since WhatsApp makes no distinction between real photographs and useless forwards, you risk deleting the good pictures too. ...