Mika is sick OK!

Mika, at the Vet
Mika, at the Vet

Mika is sick.

The Vet thinks she has Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia, a condition where the body attacks its own red blood cells. She has trouble breathing and lost her (famous) appetite.

She’s on Prednisone, antibiotics and acid regulators.

Mika is with us for almost two years now. We’ve picked her up from a shelter where she stayed after being abandoned on the streets.

Update: She’s much better now :).

Great apps for Symbian s60v3 smartphones

Keeping track of all the apps I’ve got installed on my phone is not an easy task. Here’s a quick list of the most important ones:

  • amAze GPS – Worldwide GPS Turn By Turn  navigation
  • Fring – IM and VOIP with skype/gtalk etc…
  • Gmail – Useful when I need to make a search for an old email message.
  • Gravity – The best symbian twitter client.
  • Mecanto – Streams all your music collection.
  • Mobbler – Couldn’t live without it. Scrobble and streams music to and from last.fm. Good review @ symbian-guru.
  • Nokia Location Tagger – Tags the camera phone pictures with location data.
  • Nokia Messaging – Push mail from my Gmail account.
  • Nokia Sports Tracker – Great combination of mobile app and web service. Uses the GPS to track speed, distance and course while running/walking etc.
  • Opera Mini – While the phone native web browser is quite good, Opera Mini is useful for a quick Wikipedia search from time to time
  • Qik – A great video stream that’s really easy to install and run.
  • Skyfire – Another web browser, but the only that can display flash/silverlight/whatever on a symbian phone. Hopefully will get faster and more stable with future releases.
  • Telmap Nav – Another TBT navigation app. I’m currently beta testing the new version. Really cool stuff.
  • WirelessIRC – A prefect IRC client.
  • Wordmobi – Awesome WordPress blog editor.

(Updated: August 2009.)

Using Google for OCR

Amit Agarwal has posted a tip on his blog about using Google to convert PDF to text.  For some reason, he suggest putting all your PDFs documents on the web:

Create a folder in your website (say abc.com/pdf) and upload all the PDF images to that folder. Now create a public web page that links to all the PDF files. Wait for the Google bots to spider your stuff.

Once done, type the query “site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf” to see the PDF documents as HTML.

Why would you want your documents to be accessible by anyone? Why wait for Google to index your page?

There’s a much easier way I’ve been using, and one of the commentators on Agawal’s blog points it out:

You can upload the Scanned PDFs to Gmail and sent it you only. Then Open your Inbox and the mail sent from you, you have an option to View as HTML. That will solve the Hosting problem.

Business Books for the Poor

Books
CC License. Photo credit: Marcus Q

Read, Read, Read. That’s probably the best piece of advice I ever got. Recently it’s all about business books and unfortunately, these are quite expensive around here.

So, how did my business bookshelf grew from a handful to more than 30 books in less than a year? One word – BookMooch.

It’s an amazing  book swapping site where you list books you want to give, get points for mailing them to others and use those points to get books you want. I’ve mailed and received books from almost 20 countries around the world, Including Tahiti.

As a rough estimate, books from BookMooch actually cost me (for the postage on books I send) around 5-5.5$ per book. In comparison, a new paperback will go for 21-25$ here in Israel.

I also listen to audio books while commuting or exercising, and while I agree with the criticism of DRM practices,  from time to time I also take advantage of various audible promotions to buy some audio books for really low prices.

Now, if only I could find some time to actually read all those books!

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