How Big Really

How Big Really

It often becomes a bit easy for us to visualize the size of an area if it is shown relative to something that we are already aware of.

Based on this idea, BBC has launched a new site called Dimensions where you can visualize the scale of important historical places and events by overlaying them on a map of a location that you are already familiar with.

For instance, you can set your city as the starting point for the Great Wall of China to understand how massive it is. Or if you wish to know how much distance did the astronauts walk when they first landed on the moon, simply overlay that area to some familiar neighborhood.

There’s a map of Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan where Laden was thought to be hiding sometime. Once you see that area relative to your own location, you suddenly realize how big it is.

Note: Dimensions is a prototype built by BERG for the BBC. We make no guarantee as to its accuracy, reliability or performance.

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Is it Raining Now in Moscow ?

Want to know if it’s raining in any particular city of the world?

Just go to your browser’s address bar and type IsItRaining.in/{cityname}. For instance, a URL like isitraining.in/moscow will show you the current conditions of Moscow in just one word – Yes or No.

If there are two or more cities with the same name, you can add the name of the State or Country after the name of the city to point to the right one.

Note: The tool is internally powered by Yahoo! Weather and caches results for 30 minutes so it may not give the real-time conditions always.

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Extract Text from Images & Scanned PDF Manuals Online

Extract Text from Images & Scanned PDF Manuals Online

If you are on a budget, the built-in OCR engine of Google Search is almost a perfect option for converting scanned PDFs to text – just put all your scanned PDF images onto a public website and wait for Google spiders to convert them into editable digital text.

Obviously there are two drawbacks associated with the original idea. The PDF conversion process is not real time and second, you need access to a public web server where you can upload the PDF images so that Google bots can find them.

If you aren’t willing to wait that long and need to perform instant OCR without downloading any of the software tools, try OCR Terminal – it’s an online Optical Character Recognition service where you can upload scanned images, multi-page PDF documents or even screenshots and convert them into searchable text documents.

The conversion results, as you can noticed in the screenshot above, are pretty accurate and it also preserves the document formatting and layout. You may download the extracted text as RTF or a Word Document. The output is also available as a PDF image though I didn’t find that option very useful.

OCR Terminal is a free service but you are only allowed to convert up to 30 scanned pages in a day and allows for text extraction only from English language documents. They are developing a desktop client that will allow users to convert scanned PDFs or TIFF images and get them back as formatted Word files without the web browser

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How Does a Color-Blind Person See Your Site ?

Try Vischeck on a Webpage

With around 5-8% of males diagnosed colorblind, it is increasingly important for web designers to see how colorblind users on the Internet perceive color combinations.

If you are interested in designing a more accessible website or are curious to experience websites from the eyes of a color blind, a new service called Vischeck will help.

Vischeck will help you see web pages as they appear to people who may be color blind.

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