Perform Case-Sensitive Search in Google Chrome

The Find bar (Ctrl + F) in Firefox offers a “Match Case” option to help you perform case-sensitive searches on a web page. If you type “RAM” in the find box, the browser will only highlight the phrase “RAM” on that page and not Ram or ram.

It is however not possible to do a case-sensitive search inside Google Chrome. People have been requesting this feature since the early days of Chrome but the request was turned down citing the following reason:

Discussed with UI leads. This [case sensitive search in Chrome] would be nice to have, but we’re not willing to add the options to the UI at this time. (Issue #187)

It is therefore less likely that case-sensitive search would make it to Google Chrome anytime soon but as a workaround, you can use this little bookmarklet.

Case Sensitive Find

Click the bookmarklet link in the bookmarks toolbar, type any word or phrase that you are looking for and the bookmarklet will highlight in yellow all the occurrences of that string while matching the case as well. You can click the bookmarklet again to perform another search.

For geeks, here’s the deobfuscated source code of the bookmarklet.

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How to Encrypt your Gmail Messages with Google Docs

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about email tracking and how government agencies are snooping on email conversations. If you are looking for ways to keep your email private and would not like anyone else to read your confidential Gmail messages (except for the recipient), you should consider encrypting your email before hitting the send button.

There are a couple of browser extensions that help you encrypt Gmail but here we discuss a new and more simple Google Docs based encryption method that works across all browsers and requires no add-ons or apps. You secure your message with a strong password and the recipient will have to enter the same password in order to decrypt your message.

For the technically oriented, our Google Docs based solution encrypts (and decrypts) your email messages using the industry-standard AES algorithm which is implemented in Google Apps Script using SJCL, a JavaScript library for cryptography developed at Stanford.

How to Encrypt Gmail Messages

Sender’s Computer – Encrypt the message before sending

1. Open Gmail and compose a new email message. Put the recipient’s email address in the “To” field, add a subject (this won’t be encrypted) and put your message in the email body. DO NOT hit the send button, let the message stay in your Gmail drafts folder.
2. Click here to make a copy of the “Encrypt Gmail” sheet in your Google Drive. Choose Gmail->Initialize and allow the sheet to access your Gmail account.
3. Pick your Gmail draft from the drop-down, enter a password and hit “Send Mail.”

The Google Sheet will now encrypt your email message using AES and it gets delivered to the recipient via your Gmail account. Let’s now switch to the recipient’s machine and see how they can decrypt the message.

Recipient’s Computer – Decrypt the encrypted Gmail Message

1. Open the encrypted Gmail message that just landed in your mailbox, select the body of the email and copy it to your clipboard.
2. Go to Decrypt Gmail, enter the secret password (that the sender shared with you over a phone call) and paste the encrypted email message. Hit the “Decrypt” button to see the original message.

Encrypting email with Google Docs is easy and the other advantage is that recipients can decrypt the encrypted message using any browser without requiring apps or browser add-ons.

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One more thing. When you write a draft message inside Gmail, it is automatically stored on Google’s servers. If you would like to keep Google out of the loop, you can write the message outside Gmail (say inside Notepad) and encrypt it offline before sending the message via Gmail.

You can also use these encrypt and decrypt tools to send confidential messages on other channels like Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. These tools encrypt & decrypt text inside your browser and none of your data ever leaves the local computer. ↓

Also see: Encrypt your Computer Files

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How to Encrypt your Gmail Messages with Google Docs

Lately there has been a lot of chatter about email tracking and how government agencies are snooping on email conversations. If you are looking for ways to keep your email private and would not like anyone else to read your confidential Gmail messages (except for the recipient), you should consider encrypting your email before hitting the send button.

There are a couple of browser extensions that help you encrypt Gmail but here we discuss a new and more simple Google Docs based encryption method that works across all browsers and requires no add-ons or apps. You secure your message with a strong password and the recipient will have to enter the same password in order to decrypt your message.

For the technically oriented, our Google Docs based solution encrypts (and decrypts) your email messages using the industry-standard AES algorithm which is implemented in Google Apps Script using SJCL, a JavaScript library for cryptography developed at Stanford.

How to Encrypt Gmail Messages

Sender’s Computer – Encrypt the message before sending

1. Open Gmail and compose a new email message. Put the recipient’s email address in the “To” field, add a subject (this won’t be encrypted) and put your message in the email body. DO NOT hit the send button, let the message stay in your Gmail drafts folder.
2. Click here to make a copy of the “Encrypt Gmail” sheet in your Google Drive. Choose Gmail->Initialize and allow the sheet to access your Gmail account.
3. Pick your Gmail draft from the drop-down, enter a password and hit “Send Mail.”

The Google Sheet will now encrypt your email message using AES and it gets delivered to the recipient via your Gmail account. Let’s now switch to the recipient’s machine and see how they can decrypt the message.

Recipient’s Computer – Decrypt the encrypted Gmail Message

1. Open the encrypted Gmail message that just landed in your mailbox, select the body of the email and copy it to your clipboard.
2. Go to Decrypt Gmail, enter the secret password (that the sender shared with you over a phone call) and paste the encrypted email message. Hit the “Decrypt” button to see the original message.

Encrypting email with Google Docs is easy and the other advantage is that recipients can decrypt the encrypted message using any browser without requiring apps or browser add-ons.

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One more thing. When you write a draft message inside Gmail, it is automatically stored on Google’s servers. If you would like to keep Google out of the loop, you can write the message outside Gmail (say inside Notepad) and encrypt it offline before sending the message via Gmail.

You can also use these encrypt and decrypt tools to send confidential messages on other channels like Facebook, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc. These tools encrypt & decrypt text inside your browser and none of your data ever leaves the local computer. ↓

Also see: Encrypt your Computer Files

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How to Monetize your Instagram, Flickr or Facebook Photos

Stock photographs are expensive. Some professional photographers distribute their work under Creative Commons but if the license includes the Non-Commercial (NC) clause, you (the licensee) aren’t supposed to use their images on a for-profit website or one that has ads.

ImgEmbed is an online marketplace of photographs that offers a freemium option – you can embed any image on your website for free and and pay only if the impression count for that image exceeds 10,000.

ImgEmbed uses a pay-per-view (CPM) model and website owner need to pay anywhere between $1-$10 per 1,000 impressions (the price is set by the photograph owner) once they exceed the free quota of 10,000 impressions (per image).

To give you an example, this photograph of the iconic Empire State Building in New York was found on ImgEmbed. There are no upfront costs and I will charged $3 CPM only if this blog post becomes popular and crosses 10,000 page views, else the image is free.

Sell your Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook Photos

You can also sell your photographs of ImgEmbed and earn a fee when other websites or blogs choose to embed any of your photographs.

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You can either upload photographs from your computer or the service can directly pull images that are hosted on your Instagram, Flickr, Facebook or Picasa albums. There are no charges for getting your photographs listed on the marketplace, you can set your own CPM pricing for images and ImgEmbed will take a flat 30% commission on the actual sales.

It is however important that you attach proper titles, descriptions and tags to your photos to improve discoverability. The images are hosted on ImgEmbed servers and the embed HTML code takes care of the attribution part while the photographers name is automatically added to the image.

ImgEmbed takes an innovate approach and promotes fair use of images online while offering creators, both amateurs and professionals, an opportunity to monetize their work.

That said, their catalog mostly offers medium-sized images – between 300-600 pixels – which may not be suitable for widescreen websites. Also, there are currently no filters to limit search results by color, size or even price.

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Set an Expiration Date for your Tweets

Some messages posted on Twitter are valid only for a short period of time. For instance, if you are sharing a discount coupon code that is set to expire in an hour, your tweet could still appear in the timeline of followers who happen to login the next day though that offer would have definitely expired.

Pierre Legrain, who was previously product marketing manager at Twitter, offers a very simple solution to this problem in the form of Spirit. You can set an expiration time for your tweets with the help of hashtags and the tweet will self-destruct after that time has passed.

To get started, you need to log into Spirit with your Twitter account and grant read & write permissions to the app. That’s it. The app will work behind the scenes and monitor your Twitter timeline for any time-sensitive tweets. If it finds one, the tweet will be automatically deleted after the set amount of time as specified by you in the hash tag.

Also see: How to Send Self-Destructive Messages with Google Docs

You can use hash tags like #6m (for 6 minutes), #10h (for 10 hours) or #3d for tweets that are to be auto-deleted after 3 days. You can post tweets from the web, from your phone or even through an email message and Spirit will find it as long as you have added the hash tag in the correct (#\d+[mhd]) format.

If you ever wish to pause or disable Spirit from deleting your tweets, just go to your Twitter account settings page and revoke access to the app.

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Easily Copy Files from One Cloud Service to Another

You have been using Dropbox all this while to store your files but are now planning to make the switch to another service like Google Drive or Dropbox. How do you take all your files along?

Copy Files Between Dropbox, Google Drive & SkyDrive

Mover.io is an online service that helps you easily transfer files and folders from one cloud storage service to another. The service works on a freemium model – you can transfer up to 10 GB of data for free and then pay $1 per extra GB of transfer.

Mover has connectors for all popular cloud storage providers. You may copy files from your Google Drive to Dropbox, from SkyDrive to Box or even from your old Google account to the new one. They also support FTP allowing you to directly transfer files from Google Drive or Dropbox to your FTP server, over the cloud.

There are no restrictions on individual file size limits (except for SkyDrive) and you may transfer unlimited number of files. Mover creates a mirror copy of your folders on the destination service but if a folder on the source drive has too many files, you have an option to zip them all in a single file before the transfer.

The activity log (see next screenshot) in your Mover dashboard offers a near real-time view of ongoing transfers and the service also sends a detailed email notification when a transfer job has been processed.

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Mover.io can also be configured as a backup service for your online accounts. Thus, if Google Drive is offline for maintenance, you’ll still be able to retrieve your important files through Dropbox or Amazon S3.

Otixo is another alternative to Mover though it is more of a unified manager for your various cloud storage accounts.

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The Top Android Apps

This is an updated list of the top Android Apps that have amassed more than 50,000,000 downloads on the official Google Play store. The data has been screen-scraped from Google Web Search and the Google Play store. You can also download the raw data as an Excel sheet.

Legend: The blue bars indicate the average user rating of an app while orange reflects the total number of users that have rated that app on the App Store.

App Install Base: 500 million to 1 billion

1. Gmail
2. YouTube
3. Google Play services
4. Maps
5. Facebook

App Install Base: 100 million - 500 million

1. GO Launcher EX
2. Twitter
3. Viber
4. Facebook Messenger
5. Voice Search
6. Google Play Books
7. Subway Surfers
8. Google Play Music
9. Tiny Flashlight + LED
10. Pandora
11. WhatsApp Messenger
12. Skype
13. Fruit Ninja Free
14. Dropbox
15. Adobe Reader
16. Angry Birds
17. Talking Tom Cat 2 Free
18. Street View on Google Maps
19. Google+
20. Hangouts (replaces Talk)
21. Google Search
22. Chrome Browser
23. Google Play Movies & TV
24. LINE: Free Calls & Messages

App Install Base: 50 million - 100 million

1. GO SMS Pro
2. KakaoTalk: Free Calls & Text
3. Google Translate
4. Temple Run
5. SoundHound
6. Tango Video, Voice & Text
7. Yahoo! Mail
8. Brightest Flashlight Free ®
9. Advanced Task Killer
10. GO Locker
11. Pou
12. Angry Birds Rio
13. Hill Climb Racing
14. Barcode Scanner
15. WeChat
16. TuneIn Radio
17. MX Player
18. PicsArt
19. Shoot Bubble Deluxe
20. Despicable Me
21. Talking Tom Cat Free
22. GROUP PLAY
23. Shazam
24. ChatON
25. Kindle
26. ZEDGE.
27. Jetpack Joyride
28. Google Play Magazines
29. AntiVirus Security
30. Pool Billiards Pro
31. Opera Mini web browser
32. Google Earth
33. Flipboard: Your News Magazine
34. Angry Birds Space
35. Angry Birds Seasons
36. Angry Birds Star Wars

Quick highlights:

• Facebook is only non-Google app in the Google Play Store that has been downloaded more than 500 million times. The others are Gmail, YouTube, Google Play and Google Maps that are mostly pre-installed on Android phones.
• The 50m+ list has 65 apps but the one app that enjoys the highest average user rating is Brightest Flashlight, a free app that turns your Android phone into a torch.
• Facebook has been rated by over 8 million users while 4 million Android users have added their ratings for WhatsApps Messenger on the Play Store. No other app comes close.

The charts on this page are available under Creative Commons license (Share-Alike Attribution).

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TweetDeck Trick – Clear all the Columns in One Go

TweetDeck is my favorite Twitter client. It offers columns so I can fit in tweets from multiple lists on one screen, the advanced search filters are very useful and because TweetDeck is available as a web app, I can use it almost everywhere including the iPad.

TweetDeck does supports a couple of keyboard shortcuts for navigating columns but they probably forgot to add one for clearing columns.

Currently, if you are to clear all the tweets from TweetDeck, you have to click the triangle in the upper right corner, then click the “Clear Column” button and then click the triangle again to close the expanded header. And the drill needs to be repeated for every column.

Clear TweetDeck

If you are looking for a simple one-click solution, add this “Clear TweetDeck” bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. While you are on TweetDeck website, click the bookmarklet and it will clear all the columns.

The bookmarklet only works on web.tweetdeck.com but if you are using TweetDeck’s Chrome App, there’s a workaround as well.

While the TweetDeck window is active, press Ctrl+Shift+J to open Chrome Dev Tools and paste the following snippet in the Console.

 $('.js-chirp-container').empty()

Press Return and it will clear your TweetDeck. Not the most elegant solution but better than clearing the columns manually.

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How to Publish your own Podcast on iTunes

The Digital Inspiration podcast is now available on iTunes. You can also subscribe to the podcast in other podcatcher apps using this RSS feed. The podcast packages content that is already available on my YouTube channel but a big advantage with podcasts is that you can now download the videos and watch them offline.

Publish your Podcast on iTunes from WordPress or Blogger

Publishing a podcast on iTunes is surprisingly easy and it took me less than an hour to get the whole thing up and running.

There are several approaches to publishing podcasts though the one shared here is least complicated, requires no plugins and can be used on both WordPress and Blogger platforms. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Host the Podcast Files

You need a place to host your podcast files. You can either sign-up for a web-hosting account, or use Amazon S3 and pay for what you use, or if you are looking for a free option, just upload all your podcasts on to Google Drive.

The audio podcasts should be in MP3 format while video files can be encoded in QuickTime (MOV) or MPEG-4 (MP4) formats for maximum compatibility.

Step 2: Design the Cover Image

Step 2: Create a 1400×1400 pixel image file in either JPG or PNG formats that will be used as the album cover for your podcast show. You may explore the cover images of podcasts listed on the Podcast Gallery for ideas. If you are putting text on the cover art, it should be readable even when the image is scaled down to 50×50 pixels.

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Step 3: Decide on a Tag (or Label)

Pick any common tag (or label) and attach it to all your blog posts that are be made available as a podcast. For this example, we will use the “podcast” tag (or label). Thus, the raw RSS feeds for our podcasts would be something like:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/podcast (Blogger)
http://blogname.wordpress.com/tag/podcast/feed/ (WordPress)
http://blogname.com/tag/podcast/feed (Self-hosted WordPress)

[*] Remember to replace "blogname" with your blog's actual name.

Step 4: Include Podcasts in your Blog Posts

WordPress has built-in support for podcasts while in the case of Blogger, you need to toggle a particular setting for adding enclosure support to Blogger XML feeds. Here’s how:

For WordPress users

Create a new blog post in your WordPress dashoboard and attach the tag “podcast” to that post. Now create a regular hyperlink inside this WordPress post and point to any audio or video podcast file. Publish the post.

For Blogger users

Go to your Blogger dashboard and under Settings, choose Other. Select Yes for the setting that says “Enable Title Links and Enclosure Links.” Save the changes.

Now create a new blog post in Blogger (or modify an existing one) and expand the Links section under Post Settings. Paste the URL of your podcast file under Enclosure Links. Also expand the Labels section and add the label “podcast” to your post. Publish.

Step 5: Make an iTunes Feed

Once you have added all the podcasts to your blog and associated them with the “podcast” label, your RSS feed is nearly ready though we need to add some extra iTunes-specific information to this feed like your podcast category, location of cover image, and so on.

This can be easily done with the help of FeedBurner. Go to feedburner.com and paste the URL of your podcast RSS feed that is listed in Step 3. Also enable the check box “I am a podcaster” and click Next.

Choose any name for your RSS feed, click Next and then choose “Skip directly to feed management.” Choose SmartCast under the Optimize Tab and enable “Include iTunes podcasting elements.” Complete the iTunes form and save your changes.

Step 6: Submit to Apple for Approval

Now that your podcast is ready, let’s submit it to the iTunes Store. Install the iTunes software on your computer, create an Apple ID (if you don’t have one already) and then use this special link to submit the podcast.

Apple will send an email if your podcast is approved for listing in the iTunes directory.

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Do you want to Print a YouTube Video?

The other day I came across a web app that allowed users to print GIF animations as flipbooks. The site – gifprint.com – isn’t working anymore but the idea is nonetheless interesting. The app extracts all the image frames of an animated GIF, arranges the individual frames in sequence and then creates a PDF file ready to be sent to the printer.

We can do something similar for YouTube videos as well. See sample.

When you are watching any video on the YouTube website, the storyboard for that video is automatically downloaded in the background. Our Print YouTube bookmarklet stitches all these storyboard frames as one large poster as shown in the video demo.

Print YouTube Video

To get started, drag the above bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then open any video on YouTube, click the bookmarklet link and it should instantly generate a storyboard for that video which you can either print or save as PDF.

These storyboards offer a visual summary of videos and you can generate them for short videos as well as full-length movies on YouTube. ↓

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Drag and Drop to Quickly Share Files from your Desktop

CloudUp is a simple but useful utility for Windows and Mac that lets you quickly share pictures, documents, pictures, music and other files.

You can drag one or more files from the desktop to the CloudUp icon sitting in the Windows Taskbar, or the menubar of your Mac, and they are instantly sent to the cloud. And not just files, you can drag-and-drop entire folders to the CloudUp icon and it will upload all the included files in one go.

A link to the uploaded files is automatically copied to the clipboard that you can share over email, IM chats, text messages or the social web. CloudUp generates the URL even while your files are getting uploaded in the background so there’s no waiting time.

The files that you upload to CloudUp have a secret but public URL and anyone who knows that URL can see your files and download them. You however do have an option to password-protect your shared files for added privacy.

CloudUp is slowly opening up to new users but you may use this link to jump the waiting list.

CloudUp isn’t the only app that offers simple drag-n-drop style file sharing. There’s Droplr(available for both Windows and Mac) and CloudApp (Mac only). These apps offer similar functionality but there are restrictions on how much data you can share with free accounts.

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CloudApp lets you share up to 10 files a day and the maximum size of a file can be 25 MB. Droplr offers 1 GB of storage and the limit is 25 MB per upload. CloudUp is more generous – you can upload up to 1,000 files and the maximum size of files can be up to 100 MB each.

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