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Windows Live Image Search

When you thought most of the basic innovations are done in the web search (at least to what is searchable on the WWW) there comes a new feature from Google, Yahoo! or Microsoft. That is the power of competition.

Last month it was Microsoft’s turn, where Windows Live Search team posted about the enhancements they have done in their image search. This one is interesting – it allows you to look into the photos and describe about the image inside. For example I can say, show me only Black and White Images (filter:bw) or only images with face closeups (filter:face).

Google too has these features, but I found the face filter to work well in the Windows Live Search.

Read Tamil Pages easily

Chennaionline Tamilpage without Adhiyan Chennaionline Tamilpage with Adhiyan and after pressing Alt-2

In Web today there are plethora of Encoding used for Tamil including TAB/TAM (Tamilnadu Govt. standard), TSCII (popular 8bit), TUNE and more. For each of these sites you need to download and install respective fonts, definitely a pain. Recently I found this Firefox Addon that aims to solve this problem. After downloading and installing this addon “Adhiyan” – press Alt-2 (for TSCII), Alt-5 (for TAB) and it changes the text in the page to Unicode. So without installing the respective fonts, you can read all the text in Unicode. Since it finds and replaces characters in the webpage, not all pages come out correctly. But still a very handy utility.