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Showing posts from February, 2018

How to Record your Android Screen with the YouTube Gaming App

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YouTube’s gaming platform, available at gaming.youtube.com , primarily focuses on live streaming of video games. It may not have an audience as large as Amazon’s  Twitch TV but there exist a  few unique features  that make the YT Gaming app useful for everyone, not just professional gamers. One, you don’t need additional hardware or software to live stream your games to YouTube. You can do a quick live stream from your desktop as well as your mobile phone. And the most interesting part, YT Gaming isn’t just for recording gameplay but can be used to record screencasts of any app on your Android phone. How to Record Screencasts on Android with YouTube Here’s a step by step guide on how to create screencasts on your Android phone via the YouTube app. Standalone screencasting apps may offer more features but with YT Gaming, the big benefit is that you can even live stream your phone on to YouTube with a tap. The app is free and there are no ads. Let’s get started. ...

How to Make Pixel Paintings with Google Spreadsheets

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You are using Google Spreadsheets for budgeting and project management but did you know that the same sheets application can help you create impressive pixel paintings in minutes? The Google blog recently published a story of two illustrators who created a bright and beautiful wall mural using Google Spreadsheets. Marina and Mallory connected on Google Hangouts to plan and sketch out ideas, and creatively “hack” Sheets in order to make art: resizing cells into thousands of pixel-like squares, merging cells to create color blocks, creating vibrant color gradients with conditional formatting and cell values, and other cool things we had no idea you could do with Sheets. The idea is simple. Each cell in the spreadsheet corresponds to a pixel in the painting. You compute the color of the pixel and make it the background color of the corresponding cell. Now resize the spreadsheet cells in small perfect squares and your spreadsheet will look exactly like ...

How to Keep your Folders on FTP Server and Google Drive in Sync

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How do you connect an FTP server to your Google Drive or Dropbox for transferring files in either direction automatically? Well, the easiest option would be to use a desktop FTP client like  Cyberduck  (supports Mac & Windows, free) or  Transmit  (Mac only, paid). These software applications can connect to all the popular cloud storage services including Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox and Amazon S3. They can perform a remote-to-remote sync allowing you to recursively transfer files and folders from the FTP server to any cloud service and vice versa. The only issue with using a desktop application is that it needs to be run manually on your computer. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could set up a task that continuously monitors your Google Drive (or Dropbox or OneDrive) for new files and automatically copies them to a specified FTP server? Transfer Files from FTP Server to Google Drive Enter Microsoft Flow , an online automation service that lets you create automa...

How to Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator outside Gmail and Google Chrome

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Rapportive was one of my favourite Google Chrome extensions of all time. If you are new, Rapportive added a little widget in your Gmail sidebar, you could hover your mouse over any email address and the widget would show details for that contact including their current job title, social profiles, contact details and more. This came handy in two situations. If you receive an email from an unknown person, you can quickly see their social profiles without leaving Gmail. If you are sending an email to someone but unsure if the address is correct or not, you can open the Gmail compose window, type the email address and hover your mouse to see if that person has an associated profile or not. LinkedIn acquired Rapportive and rebranded the add-on as Sales Navigator  targeted more towards the sales professional. The good part is that the original functionality continues to exist so you can still hover over any email address to view the corresponding Linked Profile right inside your Gmail...

How to Verify an Email Address?

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How do you verify if a given email address is real or fake? The obvious solution is that you send a test mail to that email address and if your message doesn’t bounce , it is safe to assume* that the address is real. [*] Some web domains may have configured a catch-all email address meaning that messages addressed to a non-existent mailbox will not be returned to the sender but in most cases, such email messages will bounce. Ping an Email Address to Validate it! When you send an email to someone, the message goes to an SMTP server which then looks for the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the email recipient’s domain. For instance, when you send an email to hello@gmail.com , the mail server will try to find the MX records for the gmail.com domain. If the records exist, the next step would be to determine whether that email username ( hello in our example ) exists or not. Using a similar logic, we can verify an email address from the computer without actually sending an email message....

Perform Text Analysis with IBM Watson and Google Docs

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Google, Microsoft, IBM and Amazon have made it easier for developers to add human cognitive capabilities (also known as artificial intelligence) within their own applications. You need not be a machine learning expert to build a computer program that can recognize objects in photographs, or one that transforms human speech to text  or even a chatbot that converses with people in natural language. The Google Photos app leverages machine learning to identify landmarks and faces in your photos. You can even build and train your own machine learning models by installing Google’s  TensorFlow library on your own computer. IBM’s PowerAI lets enterprises deploy TensorFlow like frameworks in the cloud on power systems for training custom machine learning models of any size. The IBM Code Patterns microsite hosts hundreds of ready-to-use examples around artificial intelligence. For instance, here’s an open source  repo that explains how to recognize images of houses that have...