We Have Moved, Please Update Your Bookmarks
The new home of Digital Inspiration is www.labnol.org - Please update your bookmarks.
The site has switched blogging platforms from Blogger to WordPress but you can still find our RSS feed at feeds.labnol.org/labnol.
The site has switched blogging platforms from Blogger to WordPress but you can still find our RSS feed at feeds.labnol.org/labnol.
Charlie Ayers - Google Chef Now a Millionaire
Chef Charlie Ayers joined Google as their first cafeteria chef in 1999.
Though Charlie is no longer an employee of Google, he owns 40k shares of GOOG and that are alone worth $26 million.
He also had plans to write a cookbook titled "Revealing the Secrets of the Google Kitchen" -that never happened but Chef Charlie is now busy consulting tech companies on deciding good food for their employees.
Update: Chef Charlie Ayers wife Kimberly just informed that the Cookbook is happening. It will be released in April/May of 2008. Also, Charlie is opening a restaurant in May/June of 2008.
Read more about Google Chef Charlie on NYTimes or watch this video on "How much is the Google chef worth?" at MSNBC News.
[Charlie Ayers - From managing the Google kitchen to managing millions]
Though Charlie is no longer an employee of Google, he owns 40k shares of GOOG and that are alone worth $26 million.
He also had plans to write a cookbook titled "Revealing the Secrets of the Google Kitchen" -
Update: Chef Charlie Ayers wife Kimberly just informed that the Cookbook is happening. It will be released in April/May of 2008. Also, Charlie is opening a restaurant in May/June of 2008.
Read more about Google Chef Charlie on NYTimes or watch this video on "How much is the Google chef worth?" at MSNBC News.
[Charlie Ayers - From managing the Google kitchen to managing millions]
Webmaster Central Error : URLs Restricted by Robots.txt
For some reason, Google's Webmaster Dashboard says that access to following blogspot URLs is restricted by robots.txt.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/guide-for-google-adsense-publishers.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/us-government-rss-library.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/08/screen-capture-ocr-for-text-and.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/12/anonymous-email-that-disappears.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/great-firewall-of-china-blocks-skype.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/online-logo-generator-text-logos-made.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/03/waterfalls-and-kazaa-are-bad-for-your.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/04/blogging-stocks-aol-blog-experiments.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/adobe-employees-excited-about.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/05/interesting-forms-of-art-from.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/06/louis-vuitton-ruling-could-mean.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/07/please-join-my-frappr-google-map.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/cropping-pictures-with-adobe-photoshop.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-vista-upgrade-advisor-can-go.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/01/world-time-clocks-visual-guide-to-time.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/04/privilege-of-being-adsense-premium.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/livesearch-from-yahoo-better-than.html
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/10/modify-pdf-documents-without-adobe.html
How to Add Star Rating Widget To Blog Posts
Blogs that are on Blogger or WordPress can add the wonderful Outbrain star ratings widget to their blog posts.
This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today.
Outbrain Ratings widget is light, requires no registration and intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post.
Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well.
You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment.
Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get the Ratings Widget here.
If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the link breaks from javascript else this may not work.
This ratings widget has been under a closed beta for some time but they finally made a public release today.
Outbrain Ratings widget is light, requires no registration and intuitive - visitors can hover the mouse over the five stars and click any of them to rate your current blog post.
Even if you have a regular website that's not a blog, this ratings widget can be installed on your site as well.
You need such a rating widget to get feedback from all those reader who are subscribed to your blog aren't contributing to the discussion because they are probably too lazy to write a comment.
Give them a system like this ratings widget that requires no effort and they'll be happy to say if enjoyed or disliked reading your blog post. Get the Ratings Widget here.
If you are using Windows Live Writer to insert ratings in your blog posts, make sure you remove the link breaks from javascript else this may not work.
Ticker Symbol Lookup in Yahoo! Finance
When I wrote this story comparing Google Finance with Yahoo! Finance, the one area where Google had a lead over Yahoo! was ticker symbol search.
While Yahoo! Finance required you to enter the exact stock ticker symbol in the search box, Google Finance would offer matching suggestion as you type the name of the company or stock symbol.
Today, Yahoo! Finance have enhanced their quote lookup search box and it looks even better than Google - you can now find quotes for a company even if you don't know the stock symbol.
The other nice addition is multiple search - you can look for stock symbols of multiple companies in the same search box - just separate the names by comma. When you hit Go, stock data for all those companies will appear on the same summary page.
While Yahoo! Finance required you to enter the exact stock ticker symbol in the search box, Google Finance would offer matching suggestion as you type the name of the company or stock symbol.
Today, Yahoo! Finance have enhanced their quote lookup search box and it looks even better than Google - you can now find quotes for a company even if you don't know the stock symbol.
The other nice addition is multiple search - you can look for stock symbols of multiple companies in the same search box - just separate the names by comma. When you hit Go, stock data for all those companies will appear on the same summary page.
Upload Pictures to Flickr From Windows Live Photo Gallery
This is exciting news for people who use Flickr for storing photographs on the web but prefer Windows Live Photo Gallery on the desktop for managing their picture and video collection offline.
Microsoft today released a new version of Windows Live Photo Gallery that lets you send pictures to Flickr directly from the desktop using Windows Live Photo Gallery. You can also bulk upload images and folders to Flickr using this new feature of Photo Gallery.
Like the official Flickr uploader, this one from Microsoft will also resize your pictures before uploading them onto Flickr (optional). You can also specify the photo set where that picture should be uploaded to.
Related: Compare Picasa with Windows Live Photo Gallery
If you operate multiple Flickr accounts, Windows Live Photo Gallery lets you add them all to the Flickr uploader.
You can download this Flickr enabled version of Windows Live Photo Gallery through Windows Automatic Updates (kb943550) or the common Windows Live Installer here.
Related: Download Flickr Photos in a Batch
Can You Spot This Secret Feature In Facebook
Here's a simple question for anyone who has been on Facebook for some time now.
How do you create a photo collage of your Facebook Friends (as shown above) without using any of the available Facebook Apps or third-party tools.
And no matter how large your Facebook friends list is, the whole process should not take more than 2 seconds.
Hint: This secret feature is available right inside Facebook though Mark Zuckerberg and his team never told us about it.
Answer: Once you finish exploring all the options in Facebook, read the solution.
How To Save PowerPoint Presentations Out of Google Docs
Before you upload PowerPoint PPT files to Google Presentations for editing, make sure you know that the opposite is not possible yet.
Unlike other members of the Google Docs family, Google Presentations doesn't have an export function so you cannot download your edited PowerPoint slideshows out of Google Presentations in PPT, PDF or any other popular formats.
Update: This is no longer required, you can now easily export PPT files from Google Docs.
Google Docs does allow you to download the presentations as a ZIP, which is a mix of HTML, CSS and JPGs, but again that's not a very useful or convenient format.
Considering that PPT is such a universally accepted presentation format, it is quite safe to assume that PowerPoint export feature will meet Google Presentations very soon.
But if you are getting desperate to get those PowerPoint slides out of Google Docs now itself because the boss wants them, the good old Print Screen key can be your friend.
Open the Google Presentation file in the browser that you want to import back into PowerPoint - then hit the "Start Presentation" link on the top left (or hit Ctrl+F5) to play the slideshow in a new window. As the slides progress in the browser, hit the Print Screen key each time, add a new slide in PowerPoint and insert the clipboard contents by pressing Ctrl+V.
It's not the most practical solution because the slides are now still images and therefore non-editable - but then something is better than nothing.
The print screen technique can also be used for sharing presentations created in Google Docs on any of the PowerPoint hosting services like SlideShare, Scribd and more.
Unlike other members of the Google Docs family, Google Presentations doesn't have an export function so you cannot download your edited PowerPoint slideshows out of Google Presentations in PPT, PDF or any other popular formats.
Update: This is no longer required, you can now easily export PPT files from Google Docs.
Google Docs does allow you to download the presentations as a ZIP, which is a mix of HTML, CSS and JPGs, but again that's not a very useful or convenient format.
Considering that PPT is such a universally accepted presentation format, it is quite safe to assume that PowerPoint export feature will meet Google Presentations very soon.
But if you are getting desperate to get those PowerPoint slides out of Google Docs now itself because the boss wants them, the good old Print Screen key can be your friend.
Open the Google Presentation file in the browser that you want to import back into PowerPoint - then hit the "Start Presentation" link on the top left (or hit Ctrl+F5) to play the slideshow in a new window. As the slides progress in the browser, hit the Print Screen key each time, add a new slide in PowerPoint and insert the clipboard contents by pressing Ctrl+V.
It's not the most practical solution because the slides are now still images and therefore non-editable - but then something is better than nothing.
The print screen technique can also be used for sharing presentations created in Google Docs on any of the PowerPoint hosting services like SlideShare, Scribd and more.
Technorati Blog Search Is Useful Again; Rolls Back Recent Changes
The two very useful features of Technorati - Charts and Blog Directory - mysteriously disappeared after Technorati decided to shift focus from a blog search engine to a multimedia search engine.
The move may have backfired for Technorati and so they decided to revert the changes pretty soon.
Other than charts and blog directory, you can also sort blog search results by authority like before to filter posts from blog sites that have very low or no incoming links.
Another major enhancement is that Technorati Topics have made it to the front page of Technorati. It shows a live stream of new and popular blog posts arranged in categories.
Video and Photo search features are still available but the tag search is now different than regular blog search - they are no longer clubbed together.
Pretty good move by Technorati. It will continue to remain one of favorite blog search engines on the web. Also hoping they resume publishing the quarterly State of Blogosphere reports as well. Thanks Dave and Richard.
Related: What's Hot on the Internet
What Will Happen When Google Becomes an Adult ?
The Forbes magazine today launched a new feature called the "The Future" where they invited personalities to predict trends and technologies that will become popular in the near future.
An extremely intelligent prediction about Google's future comes from David Ewalt where he says - Over the next 10 years, Google will solidify its hold on the world's information, and as it adds data service to its portfolio, it will give away free Internet access and phone service around the country. In 10 years, the company (and its ads!) will be omnipresent in American lives.
David also expects that Google will lose the cool factor - Expect Google, at 19 years old, to be regarded much like Microsoft is today - bloated, monopolistic and oppressive.
There's a very interesting quiz as well where you have to guess about events that are likely to occur in 2008 - Will Google hit $900? Will the richest person be from China ? What will the exchange rate be between the U.S. Dollar and the Euro on December 31, 2008?
The quiz is US-centric but fun nevertheless. Forbes will send you an email in January 2009 sharing your quiz score.