The Whole Enchilada

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Archive for the ‘Tools and Utilities’ Category

PDF Tools: View Docs in Browser, live previewing of PDF and docs

Posted by wholeenchilada on March 3, 2008

I came across two useful PDF Tools. The first is PDFMeNot:

Webapp PDFMeNot bypasses the need to wrangle with a separate PDF reader application—instead, it opens PDFs right inside your browser. Billed as “a nicer way of linking to PDFs,” plug in the URL of a PDF and PDFMeNot will webify the document and make it viewable in-browser, as well as offer embed code to include the PDF into any web page. To see it in action, check out the Quicksilver manual PDF as rendered by PDFMeNot. After the jump, check out the embedded version.

For more PDF fun, check out our top 10 PDF tricks.

Learn more about Box.net here: http://www.box.net/

Posted in Internet, Technology, Tools and Utilities | Tagged: , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Online tools to improve your typing skills

Posted by wholeenchilada on February 28, 2008

Though I can be a fast typer I’m always looking for ways to improve my typing speed and quality. I came across a post on improving your typing skills and thought I’d share: Improve Your Typing Skills With TypeSpeed.

Webapp TypeSpeed makes it easy to learn and improve upon your typing skills with a series of touch-typing exercises and tests. The free site (an email address is required for registration) stores your progress and shows you where improvement can be made. The only downside: if you’re used to hitting the spacebar twice after each sentence in test mode, your results won’t be recorded properly, even if you’re typing the exact words. While the website is not the most visually appealing, TypeSpeed gets the job done of improving your typing skills and looks safe for some downtime at work. For other typing tools, see previously mentioned Windows download RapidTyping and touch typing webapp KeyBR.

Read more of the post here: http://lifehacker.com/356641/improve-your-typing-skills-with-typespeed

To learn more about TypeSpeed and try it out, go here: http://www.mytypespeed.com/. You’ll need to register if you want to try all 40 texts they have for typing tests but you can try their basic test  without registering. Also, here’s some info from their website:

TypeSpeed is the fastest way to reach your full typing potential. You can use the ‘exercises’ to learn how to type, or review the most efficient typing techniques available. If you ever want to know what your typing speed is, you can take the typing test, which will tell you how well you type.


If you teach a typing course/class, you can use TypeSpeed as a teaching aid to help your students learn how to type faster. As they advance through the exercises, you’ll be relieved to know that when you want to test them, you can choose the difficulty of the texts they have to type.

The comments section referenced a tool called Fingerjig for a “typing game”. Here’s a clip from the website:

Fingerjig is a 6 minute game that tests your typing ability. Words are randomly chosen from a dictionary of over 70,000. You must try to type the words as quickly and accurately as you can!

You can learn more here: http://www.jonmiles.co.uk/fingerjig.php. Note that if you scroll below the “start” section you’ll find a set of typing tips to help you get the most out of your typing sessions.

Posted in Business, life, Technology, Tools and Utilities | Tagged: , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Cool Tool: PDFTextOnline – A Hassle-free PDF to Text Converter

Posted by wholeenchilada on February 9, 2008

Here’s some great info from makeuseof on a  a free, no-registration web app that quickly takes your files and converts them to plain text, where you can copy or save as a text file. PDFTextOnline is a “Hassle-free PDF to Text Converter” with the added bonus of being able to change font & layout style of the converted text, and the ability to access both bookmarks and properties from the original PDF. There are other features on this web app you’ll want to read up on, for now here’s a clicp from the article PDFTextOnline : Hassle-free PDF to Text Converter:

Getting text out of your PDF Documents is often a major hassle. Enter PDFTextOnline, web-based text extractor that allows users to upload and extract text from PDF documents in less then a minute. Once extracted users are able to easily change the font and layout of the text, and download it back as a text file. No registration required, simply click “Start Now” button and select the PDF document that you want to convert.

Read more here: http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/pdftextonline-extract-text-pdf/

Related reading:

Posted in Business, Internet, Technology, Tools and Utilities | 2 Comments »