Have you ever received a PDF file in an email that contained information you need in text form, but the PDF doesn't let you select the text? Sometimes this is due to access restrictions on the document, but more often it's because the person creating the PDF did so by simply scanning the document. This creates an image of the document, but does not embed the text information.

To extract the text, you need to use optical character recognition (OCR) software. Most scanners come with OCR software, but if you don't have ready access to it, you might consider using the Online OCR service.

Online OCR lets you upload a PDF file and it returns plain text that can then be copied directly into the word processing tool of your choice.

Obviously there are security concerns with uploading and storing copies of your documents on a 3rd party's site, but if that's not a concern to you, Online OCR might be just the trick to solve your OCR needs.

[via Lifehacker]

Mac users that have been spoiled by text editors like TextMate often find themselves frustrated when moving to a Windows machine. While there are lots of text editors for the Windows platform, it's hard to find one with the clean design sensibilities that TextMate offers.

Well, there's a new editor in town, and its name is Sublime Text. I don't mean to equate it too much to TextMate since they are very definitely different products; it's more the feel of using the products that drives the comparison.

Sublime Text prioritizes a slick user interface and features under the hood that make it a power-user's tool. For example, it sports the ability to give you a Minimap, which for developers gives you a 10,000 foot view of your code.

The best text editing tools seem to be powerful enough for programmers to use, yet incredibly useful for writers of prose. Sublime Text is no exception.

Unfortunately, Sublime Text is a commercial app - you have to pay for the quality, and it doesn't come cheap. A single user license will run you $59US. An evaluation version is also available.

I've written before about the Readability bookmarklet, a handy way to make cluttered sites more easily readable (and printable). Well, TUAW blogger and talented designer Brett Terpstra has made some improvements that result in an even more minimal page. Print/email links and logos are cut out, and only essential images are included. For most sites, that means you'll be left with some nicely-formatted text, and nothing more. This new-and-improved version is aptly called Readability 2.

If you need to copy-paste an entire article without grabbing images or accidentally copying weird formatting tags, Readability 2 is just the ticket. Code and pre tags are also preserved, so Readability 2 won't destroy the formatting of code snippets on a webpage. Mr. Terpstra points out that it's also great for getting text ready to be grabbed with capture tools like Evernote.

(and yes, the image above is a screenshot of this post, after using Readability 2.)

Do you remember learning what an anagram was in school, then spending countless hours trying to figure out what your name could be an anagram for? And if I do, does that make me an incredible nerd?

Okay, so now that confession time is over, I have one more thing to confess. I was never able to come up with anagrams that were any good for my name, and it turns out that there's a pretty fantastic one. How did I find it? Best Name Anagram is a simple web app that takes text input of any kind, and determines what the best anagram is that can be created using those letters. It seems to favor resulting anagrams comprised of longer words, but some names, like Download Squad, don't really have a great resulting anagram.

I probably had a little too much fun punching in my family's names, and then friends and co-worker's names. They say simple things amuse simple minds, and I can't really argue that fact.

Oh, and what does my name come out as? The not-at-all-embarrassing-I'm-totally-cool-with-it-no-really CARNAL JOKES. Nice eh?

It seems like I can't walk down the hall in my house without tripping over note-taking apps. It's the first thing that new programmers tackle when they decide to make an actual program, and as such there are thousands of options available when looking for a note taking app.

It's a bit harsh to say so, but the honest truth is that the vast majority of note-taking apps out there are utter crap. Most don't even do a reasonable job of differentiating themselves from what comes preinstalled on your computer. The Mac app Notational Velocity, on the other hand, is very useful.

A couple of caveats here: Notational Velocity is for people that need to take notes on their computer, but don't require access to them on a mobile device. It's not web based, doesn't sync with the cloud, and doesn't have a companion iPhone app.

Notational Velocity also isn't for people that need a complicated categorization or tagging structure to organize their notes. Simplicity and speed are what NV is all about.

If I haven't turned you off, there's a good chance that you'll find a lot to like in Notational Velocity. The app is cleverly designed to make adding and finding notes incredibly quick. The app has a single search field at the top of the app's window that allows you to search for content, or instantly add a new note simply by pressing Enter. Searching filters down your list of notes based on content and title with title taking precedence, and the filtering happens instantaneously even with thousands of notes stored in the app.

The app's makers suggest using Notational Velocity to create many very specific (and therefore shorter) notes instead of a few long-form ones. That allows you to more quickly find what you are looking for later on.

Here's hoping that cloud syncing and an iPhone version are just around the corner.

[via Daring Fireball]

URL shorteners, while convenient, are bad for the web. They hide the true destination that they are pointing to, giving bad guys yet another tool in their arsenal, while conditioning web users to blindly trust the links they are clicking on. Further, as the debacle with tr.im showed us, URL shortening services aren't necessarily permanent.

It's no coincidence that the rise in popularity of URL shorteners closely mirrors the rise in popularity of Twitter; Twitter's 140 character limit is the special ingredient that makes Twitter so compelling, but it's also what made short URLs valuable. Some of you will say that short URLs are useful for other reasons - for example, in print. True, but Twitter is by far the place they are used most.

So, with a 140 character limit, how could Twitter eliminate URL shorteners? Well, first, let's look at the reason for the 140 character limit in the first place. It was chosen because Twitter expected SMS messages to be the primary way that users would interact with the service. While there are many users using it that way, their numbers are far eclipsed by the number of users using Twitter on its native web site, or using one of the plentiful Twitter client apps that are available for both desktop computers and mobile phones.

Automattic, the company behind WordPress, has acquired a spiffy spellchecker called After The Deadline. It's now available on Wordpress blogs, and you can enable it in the Wordpress visual editor by clicking the ABC button with the green checkmark (If you're using a WordPress.org install, get the plugin). After the Deadline is smarter than the spellcheckers we're used to in desktop apps, because it analyzes the millions of posts on Wordpress.com to create context and get things like proper names right.

After the Deadline finds a lot of mistakes that other spellcheckers won't. If you use "new" instead of "knew," for example, ATD will know whether you've got the right one in context. It can also check for clichés, double-negatives, passive voice, and other problems that generally weaken your writing. ATD also gives you fine-tuned control over those stylistic elements: you can have it stop checking for certain problems, or teach it to ignore your intentional, but technically incorrect, word choices. ATD only works with English right now, but other languages are in the works.

[via TechCrunch]

If you want a bit of text to be human-readable, but not read or indexed by bots, TxtNinja has got you covered. It converts your text to a GIF, with customizable size, font and color. Potential uses include concealing your email address from spammers, sending sensitive information over IM, and getting around text filters on forums.

The downside of TxtNinja is that the choices of fonts and colors are very limited, and they aren't common web fonts, either. Your TxtNinja GIF, unlike a real ninja, is unlikely to blend in with its surroundings. This isn't a particularly big deal, though, and you can use it to your advantage if you happen to want your text to stand out.

Email is a convenient way to communicate, but some correspondence requires the extra effort of a printed letter. With Snailmailr, though, printed letters don't actually take a whole lot of effort. Just enter an address, type up to four pages, and pay $1, and your letter will be printed and mailed for you. Does it still count as more personal than email when you don't have to leave your computer to do it?

Snailmailr costs a little bit more than a stamp, but saves you the time of picking up stamps or printing them yourself. Including the cost of envelope and paper, $1 is a pretty reasonable price to pay. There's a little bit of an extra cost, though, if you don't want to be tacky: you can remove the Snailmailr logo from your envelope for an extra 15 cents. Everything else about Snailmailr looks good: they allow color images in letters, and they address environmental concerns by using recycled paper and buying carbon offsets.

Translation Party is a site that automates the old trick of running a sentence through machine translation until it's humorously unintelligible.

Instead of manually copy-pasting into Babelfish or Google Translate, you can just put in a phrase once, hit enter, and watch as Translation Party passes it back and forth between English and Japanese, getting further from your original meaning every time.

The translation doesn't stop until it reaches equilibrium, meaning that it repeatedly gets the same English result every time. Some phrases never achieve equilibrium, but Translation Party knows when that's happening and gives up after a while.

As an example of the strange results you might end up with, check out what came out when I put the first sentence of this post into Translation Party: "Party, machine translation, translation SAITOYUMORASU, perform the most common way to get to know me."

Knowing the various hotkeys provided by Windows is a good thing. They provide fast access to functions you use all the time, like invoking the start menu, copying and pasting, accessing the system properties page, and searching for files.

One of my most-used combinations is shift + delete, the shortcut to permanently vaporizing unwanted files. It also works in apps like Outlook Express and Windows Mail to bypass the deleted items folder. Which is one instance where the killer key combo can be a seriously mixed blessing.

You get in the habit of shift-deleting junk mail. You also get in the habit of holding shift to select multiple messages before shift-deleting several pieces of what you thought were junk mail. Except in the blink of an eye before you actually tap the delete key you notice a familiar address sandwiched between the Viagra ads and poorly-written phishing attempts.

Unfortunately, you realize this a moment too late and your messages are all gone. "I've got to stop doing that," you say, but it's become a habit.

If you're familiar with the excellent WriteRoom app for OS X, you might also love the iPhone version of the app. WriteRoom is a full-screen, distraction-free writing environment that whisks away the toolbars, icons, buttons and other attention-stealers so you can be alone with your writing work. The iPhone version does the same thing, and it also syncs automatically to Writeroom.ws, where it can be edited later on your iPhone or via a browser on your computer.

In the fullscreen writing environment of Writeroom.iPhone, you can change the text size using the zoom gesture. You can also share your document with another machine via WiFi. The iPhone app is 5 bucks, but a purchase will get you $5 off WriteRoom for Mac, or the organizational app TaskPaper. If you were planning on buying either one, you might as well grab the iPhone app while you're at it.

I don't have a problem with Adobe Air. There are a lot of great applications built on it, like TimesReader and Destroy Twitter (which I use to run the DLS Twitter account from time to time).

Adobe Wave, on the other hand, leaves me a bit puzzled. Who wants to blow 50 megabytes of ram on an application that only pushes notifications to your desktop from select websites (currently nine with five more sites coming soon)?

Who is Wave targeted at?

By now, most of you probably have a favorite Twitter client or RSS reader that you've got configured just the way you like it. And it likely doesn't use a heck of a lot more than 50Mb ram (DestroyTwitter is currently using 90Mb on my system).

On top of that, Twitter clients and RSS readers are capable of doing heck of a lot more than tapping us on the shoulder whenever a new item makes waves on Digg.

Now, I also understand that this is an initial Labs release and is anything but a finished product. Additional features could be added and the amount of memory consumed could be remedied. Even if you take those possibilities into account, would you bother installing a standalone notifier like this?

RSS has finally caught on to the point where even my non-geek friends have downloaded readers and subscribed to a few feeds. The thing is, you can't really hand out RSS feeds at a rally, post them on a bulletin board, or leave them on a table where someone will pick them up and read them. That's why it's nice that fivefilters.org has provided a free way to turn your favorite feeds into printable PDF newspapers.

I'm as anti-paper as the next guy - heck, I haven't owned a printer in years - but I know my mom's not going to read my blog if I don't hand it to her in paper form. I could do all the formatting myself, but Five Filters takes care of it automatically. The only major limitation is that it can only draw from one feed URL per PDF, but you can work around that by combining feeds using Yahoo! Pipes or a similar tool. It would be nice to pick and choose individual items from a feed reader to go into each newspaper, but this tool gets the basic job done, and the price is certainly right.