Technology

How to Add a Picture Password to your Google Forms Google Forms have this “all-or-none” problem. The forms are either public (anyone can fill your form) or, if you are on Google Apps, you can create forms that are visible to everyone in your organization. It is however not possible to restrict access to forms to specific people. Another shortcoming is that Google Forms do not allow passwords or CAPTCHAs to prevent spam bots from filling your forms with random data. Google itself maintains the reCAPTCHA project but it is not known if integration with Google Forms is in the works. There is a workaround, though. Google Forms with Picture Passwords Google Forms do not support CAPTCHA but they do offer an option to attach images with questions. These can be used as picture passwords. The idea is simple. We add a multiple-choice question where the user is asked to pick an image from a selection of multiple images. If they select...

How to Make Phone Numbers Callable in Google Sheets If you click an email link on a webpage, it opens your default mail program. Similarly, you can make phone numbers on your website “callable” meaning when someone clicks the phone number, it will launch the dialer on their mobile phone and initiate dialing of the specified phone number. It is recommended that you make phone numbers clickable as more and more people would be accessing your site on their mobile devices. How to Insert Clickable Phone Numbers in Web Pages We use the simple tel protocol to convert a plain text phone number on a web page into a clickable telephone link. For instance, if you click  this link  on a mobile phone, it will open the phone dialer prefilled with the specified number. There’s no need to copy-paste numbers. How to Type Phone Numbers in a Google Sheet It is a bit tricky to type phone numbers inside Google Spreadsheets. Here’s why: Phone numbers are mostly made of...

See the Email Sender’s Company and Logo in your Gmail The default layout of your Gmail inbox has the sender’s name listed in the left most column followed by the subject and the date of the message. The emails are  sorted  in reverse chronological order with the newest messages listed at the top. The problem with this layout is that you cannot figure out who the actual sender of a message is without actually opening the email. For instance, if you get an email from Angus who works at Google and a second email from another Angus who is employed with Microsoft, Gmail will simply show Angus as the sender for both emails. To solve this exact problem, I wrote  Gmail Sender Icons  and it is now available for everyone. It is a Google Chrome extension that will make it easy for you to identify the company or the organisation of the email sender right inside the message list of your Gmail inbox. Check out the screenshots and you’ll get the i...

Know What Facebook Can See Inside Your Photographs When you upload any photograph to your Facebook account, they look at the actual content of the photograph and try to determine what objects and scenes are inside the image. You may not have added any description, yet Facebook can determine what that picture is all about. Whether you are having a pizza, enjoying the sun on a beach, playing with your dog or spending an evening with friends, Facebook can accurately figure it out from the photo itself. They internally use these machine generated captions to make your pictures more  accessible  to blind users. Facebook Computer Vision Tags If you are curious to know what information Facebook visual recognition algorithms have found in your own pictures, here’s an easy way to view that data. Open any photograph on the Facebook website and click the thumbnail to view the enlarged version of the image. Right-click the image and choose Inspect to open the  ...

How to Easily Switch between Multiple Google Accounts Lots of us maintain multiple Google accounts for a variety of reasons. Maybe your day is mostly spent inside Gmail and Google Calendar associated with your work account but you prefer to store files inside Google Drive of your personal Google Account. Google does make it easy for you to sign-in to multiple Google accounts simultaneously so you don’t have to log out of one Gmail account to check emails of the other one. Simply go to  accounts.google.com/AddSession  and sign-in with the other Google account inside the same browser session. Sign-in is Easy, Switching Accounts is Difficult One you are logged in, click your profile image in the upper right and select any Google account from the drop down to switch to that account. The default account, the one that appears on top of that list, is the one that you signed in with first. Thus, if you ...

Let non-English Visitors Read Your Website Imagine someone coming to your site and leaving it the very next moment, not because the content was bad but because the site content was not written in his native language. It is a perfect case of a missed opportunity. Statistics show that the web has just 60% English speaking users. The rest may be from Russia, Japan, the Middle East or other regions, where people are either less comfortable reading English content or can’t read and interpret the language at all. By confining your website to English (or for that matter, just one language), you are missing a large group of people (or site traffic), who could have become potential customers or regular visitors if the website’s content had been written in their native language. Most of the machine translation services like Google Translate, Altavista, Yahoo Babelfish, Lycos are powered by Systran software. So you can choose to incorporate either of these services and the r...