.farshid sedghi’s personal blog.

Many friends have been very encouraging about this blog and have found it useful. They also have expressed interest to see more post about what is going on in our lives and see pictures.

The purpose of this blog really was and still is for my own forgetful brain to document things that I want to come back to, mostly articles, websites, tools etc and although bookmarking things in Firefox or Internet Explorer many times does it, I find this method a lot more efficient.

That said, I still don’t want to disappoint the friends visiting this blog by over and over “exposing them to yet another plugin” as one friend put it, So if you are one of those friends and would like updates (mostly pictures), either drop a comment here or drop me an email on farshid@com.gmail (flip gmail and com) and let me know and I will make sure to include you next time I upload recent pictures online.

When buying or getting a new computer (from work), most people have that one or few tools that they immediately install on their computer. Well, here is three apps I can’t be without by now:

Babylon - This is a very simple and small tool, yet ingenious. After installing, by right clicking (in combination with a key e.g. Ctrl) on anything (i.e. any text or number), anywhere (i.e. within any application window, title bar, menus, icons with text etc) it will recognize and look it up (either locally against your offline dictionaries or if none of them have the answer against all bablyon online ones). Apart from being able to look up translation and/or definitions in one or more dictionaries and encyclopedias, it will recognize and convert units such temperature, currency, measurements as well (currency are updated daily). And the fact that you can add your own dictionaries/glossaries the way I would like to with what I asked, it makes it a very powerful tool that makes life a lot more efficient. As and example, at work we have some 50,000 acronyms and expressions, so it is impossible to learn them all and on a daily basis I run into new ones. By creating my own glossary, now it is not problem and instead of going to the intranet and lookup the word or acronym, I simply right click on it. Colibri - For you Mac users, QuickSilver is probably a familiar application. This is an application that “combines the raw power of the command line with the intuitive nature of a modern graphical user interface to define a revolutionary new way of managing your computer.” I have been looking for something similar for a long while and although I found SlickRun which by the way is an awesome tool by itself, it was not as close as I wanted to be to QuickSilver. The other day though Colibri came my and so far I really like it.

PureText - “Have you ever copied some text from a web page, a word document, help, etc., and wanted to paste it as simple text into another application without getting all the formatting from the original source? PureText makes this simple. Just copy/cut whatever you want to the clipboard, click on the PureText tray icon, and then paste to any application.  Better yet, you can configure a Hot-Key to convert and paste the text for you.  The pasted text will be pure and free from all formatting.” I use this tool at least 10 times a day.

A few quick links:

(Almost) complete command list for a few Operating Systems

What a search engine spider sees -  Including word count and analysis of any URL you want to see.

Firefox Extension that packs all your installed extensions into one extension (.xpi)

The Baha’i International Community has launched a new Web site containing more than 2,500 high quality photographs on Baha’i-related themes. “The purpose of the site is to provide institutions and individuals alike with easy access to a large collection of Baha’i images,” said Douglas Moore, director of the Baha’i International Community’s Office of Public Information.

Free tool called Unlocker that helps detect and actually unlock “locked” files in Windows. You know, those ones that seem to be held by some unknown entity on your machine. [via ISerializable]

http://www.google.com/ig/usgov - You can search all goverment sites and actually find the forms you ae looking for.

Here is one for all World Cup fans in Football:

Joga is a FireFox extension that gives you all the latest scores live.

And if you care, you can see replays from all scored goal from 8 different ‘camera’ angles. Fairly cool site . A word of warning though, the site is in Swedish, but you don’t need any in depth language skills to click on the buttons.

Update: JaJah has a Firefox Extension which is pretty handy as it highlights phone nrs in a page. 

Came across www.jajah.com yesterday as I was looking up a friend’s number on my plaxo account. There they had a icon to call your friend the JaJah and I tried it and it was super smooth and good voice quality. On top of that it was cheaper than the provider that I am currently using.Simply put you type in the number (anywhere in the world) you want to call on the website and click a button. The service calls up your phone first and then calls the receiver and connects the two phones together. Everyone who visits the site gets three mins of free trial, so feel free to test it.

If you have other similar services that you are using and are happy with here in the States, please drop a comment and let me know.

UPDATE:

Based on the comment of SamZeb, I tried http://www.callwave.com/ och if you live in North America, this service is a lot better than GotVoice.com that blogged about below. Thanks Sam!

It’s a been a while since I got a chance to keep up with the latest and greatest when it comes to cool stuff as work has kept me really busy. One of the things I really enjoy at work is the unified messaging system we have. For those who don’t know what that means, here is a definition:

“The use of computers and data communication equipment to provide a single mailbox for email, fax, and voice messages accessible by PC, Web browser, and telephone.”

As you can see this makes life a lot easier to work from anywhere. I was wishing to have something similar for my personal cell phone, i.e. receive my voice mails over email (you could ask why that would be useful; I promise you it is, for me at least). And seems there is a company that provides this service for free (for retrieviing 3 msgs/day). So if you are comfortable with the fact that this company can listen to your voicemails, you might find http://farshid.sedghi.org/wp-admin/www.GotVoice.com useful.