Writers, of course, are also readers and they often come across material that might be inspiring or worthy of quoting in an article, book or research paper. PDF Writer is a new app that makes it easy to capture and collect text from a variety of sources.
The app uses the phone's built-in camera to highlight and scan text from PDF documents. Once the text is captured, PDF Writer lets users edit, annotate and revise the text to meet their needs. Users can add a signature, change the text size and font, apply highlights or markup elements.
Text passages can be revised and organized by adjusting font sizes to create headings and subheads. The app offers more than 150 font options and a full pallet of colors.
Collected passages can be saved to an unlimited number of color-coded folders or shared as a PDF, image or rich text file. The folders can also password protected. Editing and file management is all done within the app and does not require an Internet connection.
The iOS version of the is available in the Apple App Store. It runs on Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch running iOS 14.1 or later. It's also available for the Macs that have the M1 chip and macOS 11.0 or later.
The app is free to download and use. Subscriptions are available for a Premium Pro version.
The PDF Writer app was developed by RiverFlow App, which also created other PDF-focused apps including PDF Pencil and an app that will merge, scan and split PDF pages.
There was a time when I always carried a pen and few scraps of paper. I wanted to be ready to jot down a phone number, a reminder, an appointment or something to add to my shopping list.
Of course those days are gone now that everybody carries a computer -- their mobile phone -- in their pocket or purse. And those phones offer several apps to capture notes or reminders. But so far, I haven't found one specific app that will quickly and efficiently capture and file every piece of data.
JotBlue just might be the one. It's a recently upgraded app for Android phones that can handle and manage a wide variety of information bits. For instance, you can type in text or activate the phone's microphone to dictate a note or appointment.
And it solves a problem I've had with Evernote, one of the most widely used apps for capturing and storing notes. When I want to take a note with Evernote, I have to find the topic I want it to be stored under, otherwise it just becomes a generic catchall memo.
JotBlue uses a clever letter code to tag a note right from the start and direct it to the proper folder. The letters correspond to topics: A = Appointment, B = Buy, C = Call and so on.
Need a reminder to buy a gift card for your brother? Type B, then a space, then "gift card for Pete." Type a D to make an entry in your diary or E to record a business expense.
Here's one more feature that I like about JotBlue: You don't have to give up Evernote. If you sync Jotblue with Evernote, all of your Jotblue notes will also be recorded in your Evernote App.
JotBlue is available as a free download in the Google Play Store. For more details, check out the video below and visit the JotBlue website. JotBlue is also on Facebook and @jotblue on Twitter.
I paid a lot of money for my new phone, partly because it came with a fast processor and plenty of data storage. But I can't tell tell you how fast my CPU is running or how much of that storage is being used at any given time.
Well, I could look it up, but that would require a lot of poking around to find the right reporting tool.
What I would prefer is a single app that would calculate and report all of the important metrics that impact my phone's performance and make that information easily accessible.
Android users can install an app that does just that. It's called CPU Information. It gathers performance data from every corner of your phone and arranges all of the available reports in ring of icons. Think of it as the one ring to rule them all.
Touch the CPU icon and you get details on the chip's architecture, usage stats and clock measurements. The RAM report tells you about memory demand, buffers and cache while the storage report calculates the size and available space on internal drives and memory cards.
Other reports look at the phone's display screen, camera, graphics processor, SIM card, Wifi connection and battery. It will even tell you how much power is being used by the phone's accelerometer and magnetometer. And the developers say more features will be added in the coming months.
The app is available as a free download in the Google Play Store.
For a closer look at CPU Information, check out the video below and visit the Parallel Axion website.
In my neighborhood, there’s not many options for broadband Internet service. I can get it from the cable company or the cable company. And if I want speedy service, I’ll be on the hook for a hefty monthly fee.
That’s why I’m investigating other ways to get faster downloads. One is Internet Download Manager, a Windows software program that promises a dramatic increase in in download speeds for transferring large files from the web such as games, music, videos.
The people who created IDM say Internet Download Manager is able to segment downloads and reuse web connections to assist it in achieving rapid download speeds.
The software also offers several other useful features. IDM gives users the ability to resume unfinished downloads and download videos from most popular video websites. It also allows users to schedule downloads and set limits on download rates.
The program costs $24.95 and works will multiple versions of Windows, from XP through Windows 10. It integrates with most popular browsers including Internet Explorer, FireFox, and Google Chrome.
Few things can strike fear into the minds of a computer user as thoroughly as a malware attack. Malware is malicious software that can sneak into you computer and begin displaying unwanted advertising or do serious damage to software and data files.
Fortunately, there are a number of programs available that will detect malware and either block it from being installed or remove it after it’s been identified.
A program called MalwareBytes is often listed by computer security experts as one of the best choices for malware protection.
MalwareBytes is suite of security programs that can safeguard computers and mobile devices adware, spyware, trojans and other infections.
Once the program is downloaded and installed, users can select how they want their system scanned for infections. The software will do an immediate scan that looks at “all the places where malware is known to hide” or scanning can be customized to target the computer’s memory or startup objects, for example.
The results of the scan are displayed along with suggestions for removing or otherwise dealing with known or threats or suspicious programs.
A free version of MalwareBytes if available from Erase Malware, an erase malware website. The free version will scan a computer and remove threatening programs. An upgraded version that costs about $30 includes real-time threat screening.
Do you remember what Steve Jobs said about the iPad? It was intended to be a platform for consuming media - listening to music, watching video or reading books and magazines.
I suppose that’s why there’s nothing like the Mac's Finder built into Apple's iOS operating system for portable devices.
My Files is an iOS app designed to fill that vacancy. It lets you do things you expect to do with a computer, like create folders and text files and do things like cut, paste, delete or rename - all the things we learned to do with a computer.
The app also includes a document viewer plus an audio and video player. You can view PDF, Word and Excel files, extract files compressed with ZIP or RAR utilities and send a file as an email attachment.
In the app, files appear with a + button that reveals a menu of action when it’s tapped. You can also use a long press to select or deselect text and other data. File security is protected with a passcode and encryption.
My Files is available as a free download in the iTunes App Store.
The PostgreSQL database format got a big boost last month when Amazon Web Services said it would offer PostgreSQL as a fully managed service on Amazon Web Services.
PostgreSQL has become a popular alternative to Oracle, a widely-used database platform that often comes with a high price tag and strict licensing requirements.
Oracle users looking to migrate their data to PostgreSQL can check out Oracle-to-PostgreSQL, a program developed by Intelligent Converters that runs on Windows XP and later versions, including Windows 10.
Oracle-to-PostgreSQL allows users can export Oracle table definitions as data definition language (DDL) statements, convert the statements into PostgreSQL format and import the resulting table definitions into the target PostgreSQL database.
In addition to table definitions, users can also export data, constraints, indexes and foreign keys. The software supports all versions of Oracle and PostgreSQL including Software as Service (SAAS) variations of the database management systems.
Pricing for Oracle-to-PostgreSQL starts at $49. For more details and pricing options, check out the Oracle-to-PostgreSQL page on the Intelligent Converters website.
Count me among the many fans of Flipboard who were delighted when the mobile app made the jump to the Web last year.
For me, Flipboard has become a reliable and often entertaining way to keep up on topics of interest, from consumer technology to online security and website design with side helpings of politics, movies and current news.
I like Flipboard’s option to create a personal magazine based on those topics, but I often need to collect images of what I see when I click through to the original source of an article I see on Flipboard.
Those sites typically display a line of action buttons to share an article on social media or send the URL by email. But almost never see a option built into a Web page that lets me take a screen shot. And in many cases, that’s just what I want - an image that captures the headline, byline, posting date and URL.
In the days when I did my work on a Windows PC, I could get a quick screen shot by pressing a key labelled PrtScr. There’s no such key on my iMac keyboard, so I went looking for a print screen Mac tool.
I found a simple guide that explained which key combinations to use to capture different images and have the resulting graphic file helpfully dropped on my desktop. Tony Tran’s article explains the steps to get snapshots of a full screen or selected areas. His tips have been a big help for my Flipboard research.
Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is widely used to transmit and share files across multiple computer platforms. But it’s not 100% portable. Some mobile messaging apps will support text and images but balk at moving PDF files.
Softonic’s PDF to JPG Converter offers an easy alternative to work around that limitation. The desktop software will quickly convert a PDF file into a JPG image file. A JPG image is universally accepted by apps and operating systems without any special viewing software.
The conversion program supports all types of PDF documents, including those with unusual type fonts and color graphics. It will also accepts PDFs that have password protection.
Users can designate the DPI (dots per inch) density of the of the output image to control file size and clarity and it will convert a PDF into other image formats such as TIF, PNG or GIF.
It also supports batch processing to convert multiple PDF documents. And the program works offline, so it doesn’t require an open connection to the Internet.
A free trail version for Windows computers is available at CNet’s Download site or directly from Softonic. You can see the program at work in the tutorial video below.
We’ve all done it. We write an email, hit the Send button and then the terror comes. We suddenly remember that we forgot an attachment or got a name or date wrong.
Even worse, the message might have been sent to the wrong recipient or we were a bit too emotional in our choice of words. Either way, we’re going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Fortunately for Gmail users, there is a way to unsend an email, if you act quickly and if you know the procedure.
There’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to recall an email in Gmail posted on the web. The first step is to enable an option called Enable Undo Send in your Gmail account. Unfortunately, the process only works from a desktop or laptop Gmail client. It doesn’t work with a mobile phone or tablet and the “undo” has to be done no more than 30 seconds after the mail was sent.
To get the full walk-thru - plus tips on recalling an email in Outlook - visit the website that’s appropriately named How To Recall An Email.
It’s not as though computer users needed any more reasons to back up their data. We were already living with the triple threats of theft, disaster and hardware failure. Now there’s the specter of ransomware, a hacker locks your files with an encryption program and demands a payment to get the key.
Microsoft Windows an other operating systems typically include a simple backup utility that will schedule backups for an entire system. That approach is fine for many home users. But if you’re in change of a household or small business with several computers, things can get complicated.
For example, you might have servers, network drives or external USB drives. Maybe you have data that is constantly changing and should be backed up continuously rather than nightly or weekly. It might also be advisable to encrypt some files in your backups while making others available in their natural format.
Those are the kinds of tasks that BackupChain was built to perform. It’s a Windows backup program that can be used in a wide range of scenarios, whether you’re an IT professional or a home user who needs to protect a single PC.
BackupChain offers a fully-functional version of its software that you can use for free for 20 days. I downloaded it from the company website and installed the program on a laptop running Windows 7. I had the software up and running in less than five minutes and I was making my first backup about 10 minutes later.
BackupChain lets you easily create Tasks that tell the program what to do and when to do it. A Task Wizard stores the settings for each job an the Tasks can be run manually at any time or they can be set to kick off on a schedule. One Task might back up an entire computer, another might copy an SQL database or run on a virtual machine.
If your backup needs are simple, just tell BackupChain to make a Universal Backup an store it in a local folder, on a network drive or some other destination and you’re good to go. BackupChain will store the backed up files in compressed format to save space on the target drive.
But the program is especially useful is you have more complex requirements. For instance, you might have a preference for for how files are compressed. BackupChain lets you specify ZIP, Tar or one of several other compression formats.
Backups can also save files without compression so they can be easily found and opened. You also get options for encryption formats, including one that’s HIPPA compliant. For additional security, BackupChain will store backups offsite using an FTP destination.
Once you’re comfortable with basic backups, you can create additional Tasks for specific jobs. I set my Universal Backup to make updates every Friday at 3 a.m. and created another task to update a folder containing spreadsheets every night. The program can also be fine-tunes for special tasks like backing up an SQL server or Microsoft Exchange.
BackupChain is available in four editions with license prices starting at $62.95US for one year of software maintenance. For more details visit the BackupChain website where you can download the free trial package and a user guide.
You may remember the news story that broke about two months ago about a large hospital in Los Angeles paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoins to hackers in order recover its files and computer systems.
Since then, there’s been more bad news. Several more medical centers in California, Indiana and Maryland have all been the victim of cyberattacks, many of them using ransomware.
One of the malicious programs being used by the hackers is TeslaCrypt 3.0, which encrypts important files on a target computer and sets a price tag to obtain the private key that will unlock them. Once inside a target computer, the malware scans hard drives, USB memory sticks, shared network drives and even off-site storage sites such as Dropbox.
A detailed description posted on the Soft2Secure website says “TeslaCrypt 3.0 encodes the objects found during the scan using AES-256 standard, as opposed to asymmetric RSA algorithm used by the bulk of ransom trojans on the loose. The malware then launches an application that informs the victim about what happened and instructs them on further action to recover the locked data.”
Soft2Secure also provides more details about TeslaCrypt and other malware programs and has a Windows utility that the company says will remove the malicious program.
Adobe's PDF format has become the standard format for business documents and communication. Fortunately, you can manipulate PDF files without spending a bundle to get Adobe’s Acrobat software.
For example, let’s say you have two or more PDF documents that you want to merge into a single file. There’s a Windows program called PDF Merger that will do the job for free. The program is available from Free PDF Utilities, which also had software to split, resize or add watermarks to PDF documents.
PDF Merger requires a Windows PC running Vista or Windows 7, 8 or 10 with 50MB or free drive space. You can download PDF Merger or the other programs at the Free PDF Utilities website.
Mac users who frequently deal with Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) are likely to become frustrated if they can only read or preview the documents. The Mac software developer Cisdem has created a utility that lets users do much more than read a PDF document.
PDFManagerUltimate includes several advanced editing features that let users merge, split and compress documents; add comments, annotations and sticky notes; rotate and highlight pages and elements; and extract text and images.
The program also incorporates OCR technology that will convert a scanned PDF into a variety of other file formats such as HTML, EPUB, PPT and files for Word, Excel or Keynote. You can also add a signature to a PDF file and encrypt the file with a password.
The program has a price tag of $69.99 and there’s a free trial version available to download at the Cisdem website.
Now that there are grandchildren in my life, I’m spending more time shooting, editing and publishing video. With family members in six states asking for more videos, I’ve created a website for posting and sharing clips and my blockbusters.
YouTube, of course, will store the videos and provide code for embedding a player on a web page. But I’ve also found an interesting alternative that doesn’t require me to surrender my content. Easy HTML5 Video is a free processing utility that will convert video from any common format into HTML5.
What’s HTML5? It’s a recently-developed markup language (the fifth version of the HTML standard) that plays video on a variety of platforms (desktop, mobile, tablet etc.) and works with all of the most widely-used browsers. Have you ever tried to play a video and been told you need a codec or a different player or a newer version of Flash? HTML5 avoids all that nonsense.
With HTML5, you don’t have to upload your clips and movies to some third-party resource like YouTube. The video stays on your server where it can be easily updated and where you control who gets to see it.
And, as its name proclaims, Easy HTML5 Video could hardly be easier to use. I downloaded and installed the Mac version from the Easy HTML5 Video website, which asked for my email address but did not require registration or any personal information.
Once launched, the software presents a drag-and-drop window where I deposited an MP4 video that I had created in iMovie using video from a Periscope session on my iPhone. The program starts by asking you to select a poster image. You can select a frame from the video or upload a separate image.
Next, you select compatibility options for the output file. Do you want Ogg, WebM and low-res MP4? Just click those icons. Don’t care about Flash? Leave it unchecked. You can also change resolution quality in steps from 240p up to 4K.
Converting my 2-minute video took less than 10 minutes and I couldn’t see any loss of quality in the converted version. Once the process is finished, the program offers to export your new video to a local folder or to an FTP directory. It also provides a code block for inserting the video, with player controls, directly into an HTML page.
The Easy HTML5 Video website has more details and free versions of the software for Windows or Mac. With the free version, there are no limits to the number of conversions you can make for non-profit use, but it does apply a watermark to the converted video. There’s a commercial version for $69 and an enterprise version is $99.
In our city, there’s at least a half a dozen shops that offer to wipe your computer’s hard drive and restore the operating system for about $100.
Why would someone need to do that? I think many of their customers have PCs that are so deeply infested with always and spyware that scrubbing the hard drive is last and best option.
Using a good protection program like PC Spyware Shield could have saved them a lot of money and work. The Windows program uses an updated database of definitions to identify and remove spyware, malware and adware.
The program will scan for malicious applications on a routine basis or it can be launched manually. Once is finds a threat, it quarantines and deletes the offending program.
PC Spyware Shield works with Windows 7, Windows XP and Vista. There’s a free version that offers up to 25 fixes or a Pro version that does unlimited repairs for $29.99. For more details, visit the PC Spyware Shield website.
When my wife’s Android phone began to get sluggish and display “low memory” notices, I suggested she try Rocket Boost. It’s an Android app that promises to clean up and speed up Android smartphones.
The app includes a one-tap Speed Up button that promises to make the phone run faster and smoother. A Memory Boost option kills unneeded background tasks that eat up memory resources and slow the phone’s performance.
Other Rocket Boost options include deleting junk files, finding and removing “spammy” apps and an easier system to uninstall apps. It also offers a widget that will launch the clean-up process from your home screen.
Back in the 1990s, losing stored data was a full-blown disaster. There was software that could recover erased or damaged sectors on a hard drive or restore a blown partition, but it was a difficult job that took most of a full day. Today, there are sophisticated utility programs like Do Your Data that make data recovery fast and painless.
Do Your Data says it will find and restore lost data from a local hard drive, an external hard drive or a lost partition and it works with a wide range of devices including servers and RAID arrays.
The recovery program works with all common file formats for photos, videos, emails, audio, documents and folders and it doesn’t care whether you accidentally formatted a drive, got a virus infection or saw your operating system crash.
Do Your Data is available in formats for Windows (including Windows 10) and Macs. There’s also a Mac program that recovers iPhone files. You cab download a trail version for free or buy the full package. Prices for a single user version start at $34.50.
I was browsing the books in the genealogy section of a large library a few years ago when I found a detailed history of the Civil War battles that involved one of my ancestors. My problem was how to capture that passage for my own records.
In those days, the usual solution was to make expensive and painstaking copies of every page that I wanted. Today, I could easily capture all of the text using OCR Instantly, an iOS app quickly converts images into text.
The app works like a bar code scanning app. You use the iPhone camera to capture a clean and well-lighted image of the text you want and press the OCR button. The app reads the words in the image and converts them into plain text that you can store, export or send.
The app works without an Internet connection and the digitized text can be copies to the device’s clipboard or shared directly with another app.
The app works on almost any iOS device, including iPads and the iPod Touch. It can read more than 60 languages, including Swedish, Greek, Russian and even Cherokee, though the developers warn that results may not be good for some graphic languages like Arabic or Chinese.
OCR Instantly is available in the iTunes App Store. An ad-supported version is free and you remove the ads with an in-app purchase. A version for Androids also is available in the Google Play Store.
Sometimes the files you delete stick around for a while in your desktop trash bin and sometimes they are, you know, deleted, gone, kaput, never to be seen again.
Well, maybe not never. I wouldn’t give up the search until after I tried Disk Drill.
The file-recovery utility from 508 Software earned its reputation digging for deleted files on Mac hard drives and other devices including external hard drives, cameras, iPods, USB flash drives, Kindles, and memory cards.
The program scans storage locations ad displays a list of files that can potentially be recovered. It will also rebuild damaged partitions and deploy the Recovery Vault, which tracks deleted files and remembers file names and data locations.
Disk Drill is now available in a program that works the same margin on Windows computers, including those running Windows XP or later versions. Visit the Disk Drill website and it will direct you to Disk Drill for Macs or Disk Drill for Windows.
Disk Drill PRO for Mac OSX costs $89, the Windows version is free.
I started reporting on gadgets and gear when Atari ruled electronic games and computers used floppy disks. My weekly column ran in the The Louisville Courier-Journal and online at USAToday.com and ABC News.com. I was a regular at tech trade shows including COMDEX, CES and the CEDIA show for home theater. Follow @GizmoEditor on Twitter and on Facebook. Contact me at ricman@iglou.comI also create short videos for vendors to use on Amazon and YouTube. Click here to see a portfolio of my recent videos.
Video by Gizmo
Need a video to promote your app or product? Check out my gig at Fiverr.com and browse my video portfolio here.
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