Tag: Software Reviews

Resilio Sync – Best File Sharing Solution

Posted on by Ajmal

I’ve been thinking of starting a new section wherein I can share some of the productive software tools that have been of tremendous use for me over the past few years. The software review section would cover these articles.

Be it any profession or activity we do, each one of us would have definitely come across situations wherein we need to share large volumes of files (large quantities and large sizes of files) with our friends or co-workers. Often this can become a hassle and a troublesome process, especially if you and your friend/coworker work together on a similar project or assignment and both of you put up with or exchange several files back and forth in the same folder.  The hard and painful way would be to use a USB flash drive to exchange files back and forth. Other people opt for cloud-based file-sharing services like Dropbox or Box. For large scale work, using these cloud services could be a problem as these cloud-based file-sharing services do have storage limits and they often have a cap on the file sizes being shared. For instance, it’ll be a trouble to go ahead and share a file of size 5 Gb as an example. One solution that I’ve been using for the past several years is a product called Resilio Sync. It’s free for personal use and they have a paid version for professional use. This software uses peer-to-peer technology in a very effective way.

I shall demonstrate a scenario at home or work which almost all of us can relate to.
Let’s say Person A and Person B collaborate together on a project. They’re basically looking to have a common shared folder on each of their computers and if Person A puts a file into the folder, Person B should also get it. And any changes made by any person need to be synced with the other person as well. And this sharing process should have no limits in terms of the number of files being synced or the size of the file being shared. Now, here’s where Resilio Sync can be of immense use for you!

First, Person A and Person B each have to download and install Resilio Sync. It’s a nifty little app that sits in your system tray. It’s available for Mac and PC as well. Person A can create a folder in his / her computer and add that folder to the Resilio Main Window. Once it’s added, on right-clicking that folder, Person A would get an encrypted sharing key. It’s a mix of letters and numbers. Person A has to send this to Person B. On the other side, Person B, after installing Resilio has to add this key to the main window and select a folder to be assigned to it. That’s all.

Now, Person A and Person B have corresponding folders in each of their computers that sync with each other. There is no limitation on the size of the file or the number of files that can be synced.

This program has been of good use for me for the past several years and I thought of sharing it here may that it might be of some use for all of you in some way or the other.

Shapr3D

Posted on by Ajmal

Occasionally some technology comes in and just blows your mind! This is one of them. We commonly hear about engineering software slowly growing themselves into tablet and mobile platforms to leverage their potential to changing needs with AI and machine learning engulfing every field you name. Being someone who works with engineering design, I truly believe the app by Shapr3D has truly taken into the next level with their ease of building 3D illustrations. I would like to take a demo sometime in the future.

I hope the future of engineering simulation engines taking a similar course in the future is not too far away. Probably I foresee those heavy engineering-grade GPUs in separate cloud servers and the mobile device being a “console” to leverage the huge cloud power. Google has done it with Stadia for gaming.

Google Photos – Geeky Uses!

Posted on by Ajmal

Google Photos definitely is an industry game-changer. Over the past few years, it has completely revolutionized the way in which people organize and curate their photo archives. Powered by world-class artificial intelligence and neural networks, Google photos take photo organization and curation to the next level and also allows an option for unlimited storage of photos. As many of you might be aware, we can search for specific items or entities *within* a pool of photographs and you can get quick results. You can combine the searches with a lot of other keywords like familiar faces, location or other metrics. Different people use it tailored to their requirements. You can use it in a novice fashion or you can even delve into the depth of the system to use several features.
I’m sharing three uses of Google photos that are often unused by many.

Tapping the potential of Google Lens.

Using Google lens to identify and copy text in a photograph.  As their website puts it, it is basically “searching what you see”. Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google, designed to bring up relevant information related to objects it identifies using visual analysis based on a neural network. [ Link ]
The below screenshots are for some demonstration:
When you open the image and click on the magnifying lens icon in Google Lens, it’ll read through the image and find possible correlations depending on the context. For example, in the first image below, we have a beautiful bougainvillea flower and when we tap on it with google lens, it provides some contextual information and provides details about it. In the second image, when we click on the photograph of a car, it recognizes the model of the car and shows some relevant information. That’s really helpful.

Similarly, we can copy text from an image file containing text content. For instance, please see the below image. It has text in it and Google photos can be used to copy text from that image and you can even translate it right away. How cool is that!


You can read more here.

Untapping AI searching capabilities
Using AI algorithms and neural networks, Google can find what you’re looking for.

Eric Griffith writes for PCMag :

Try some searches in Google Photos, using terms common and obscure. Google’s auto-tagging of images is pretty amazing, beyond just the face recognition (which I found could ID people in photos even if they’re in the background). For example, a search of the term “dog” got just about every image I could conceive of with my pups in the pics—even some with just a pup statue or paw. I didn’t tag any of those pics with “dog” or “statue,” by the way: Google just knows. Location searches are also easy with geo-tagging, making it easy to find, say, all your vacation pictures at once.

Using Google Photos to embed images in blogs or websites.
Inherently, by design, Google doesn’t explicitly advertise itself as an image host service for blogs and websites. Considering that the entire repository of our photographs are archived at Google photos, it makes a nice photo host. Labnol has released a nice little tool to embed Google photo images into blogs and websites. Once you copy-paste the public link from the image, paste it into the website of the tool and it’ll generate an embed code that you can put on your blog or site.