Thursday, December 07, 2006

AOL Launches AIM Share Social Bookmarking

AOL has gotten into the social bookmarking game with AIM Share, letting AIM users "broadcast" URLs or messages instantly to their buddies. An alert appears in your friends' Buddy List letting them know when something's been broadcast. There's also a handy bookmarklet for Firefox and IE available that lets you quickly share your findings.

It's an interesting combination of IM and social bookmarking since new finds are shared in real-time, giving AIM Share more of a collaborative feel than, say, del.icio.us.

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Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007

With the impending release of Office 2007 and its plethora of strange, new file formats, you might want to consider installing a compatibility pack from Microsoft that lets you open, edit, and save in these new formats.

For the most part, the new formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 are just elaborations of current ones plus one extra letter. They are the following:
Microsoft Office Word 2007
• Word 2007 document (*.docx)
• Word 2007 macro-enabled document (*.docm)

Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007
• PowerPoint 2007 presentation (*.pptx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled presentation (*.pptm)
• PowerPoint 2007 template (*.potx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled template (*.potm)
• PowerPoint 2007 show (*.ppsx)
• PowerPoint 2007 macro-enabled show (*.ppsm)

Microsoft Office Excel 2007
• Excel 2007 binary workbook (*.xlsb)
• Excel 2007 workbook (*.xlsx)
• Excel 2007 macro-enabled workbook (*.xlsm)
• Excel 2007 template (*.xltx)
• Excel 2007 macro-enabled template (*.xltm)
• Excel 2007 add-in (*.xlam)

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Building a Search Bot for Kids

Searchbots is like building (rolling) your own search engine for kids. The process of building your searchbot parallels building a real robot: you choose which parts you want your bot to have, install search circuits, and tell it what to search for (tags). It has a fun flavor that's missing in other custom search engines like Rollyo and Google Custom Search.

You can change how your bot behaves by changing its search chip. A Tags chip will make it search by keyword while an Ask question chip will make it respond to queries in question form. There are also color, location, and, coming up, mood search chips. Search results are presented in thumbnail format, as you can see below. Results aren't perfect so it's good that you can rate them.
If you had a feeling of deja vu while reading this post, it's because Searchbots is a holdover from the (first?) Internet bubble that been re-purposed as a research project on experimental search engines.

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Make Me Move: Sell Your Home with Zillow

The popular real estate site Zillow has introduced some new features today: you can now put your home up for sale along with pictures and descriptions for free, name a price at which you would move out (Make Me Move), and contribute to a Real Estate Wiki that's been seeded with 100+ articles.

In the area of consumer empowerment, being able to quickly list your house online for free is nice. It certainly makes the allure of hiring a real estate agent lessen.
I really like the clever Make Me Move feature: even if you're not serious about moving, someone might come along with a great offer that you would have otherwise missed out on. It works by allowing interested buyers to contact sellers anonymously through email.

Zillow is innovating nicely and might even be able to eventually cut out the middle-person (real estate agent).

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Experience Earth with Geojoey

Geojoey is a social travel site that features an interesting UI to help users find popular travel experiences. It's a three pane interface with one pane featuring a Google Maps mashup, the second a tag cloud, and a third that lists travel experiences along with Digg-like voting buttons. It all sounds a lot like a best-of of various popular sites, but it works surprisingly well.You can filter for the most popular experiences, and the map will start to be populated with flags listing their location and number of votes. A good implementation of Ajax makes transitions smooth. It's also possible to search for specific landmarks.
The only problem is the lack of traffic. As a result, there's a lot of noise when applying the social filters like most popular. Not enough people voting means that the results are likely to be skewed, and in some cases, it looks like entries are taken from Wikipedia or other sites. Still, there are a lot of interesting experiences on the site that you probably won't find mentioned in a popular travel guide. It's a shame that there aren't more users of Geojoey because it does offer something different to the current array of travel sites.

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Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Reveal Passwords Hidden Under Asterisks

If you ever find yourself in the position of needing to decode a password hidden beneath a string of asterisks, Asterisk Key will be a lifesaver. It's a simple freeware program that will scan open webpages and dialog boxes and return a list of the passwords it finds.

Download Asterisk Key

[via BlogisEverything]

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Running Firefox with 200 Extensions

This is what Firefox looks like on crack:

More importantly, Firefox still works even with 200 extensions installed and running at the same time.

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24 Season 6 Prequel on YouTube

Something to tide any 24 fans over until season 6 of the hit television series 24 premieres. Warning: the prequel may be too violent for some readers.

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Sxipper Helps You Manage Your Online Identity

Never forget a password again! Identity management company Sxip has released a Firefox extension called Sxipper ("Skipper") that remembers every password you enter and also auto-fills registration forms. Your personal information is encrypted and stored on your computer so privacy concerns should be minimized.

A Sxipper dialog box opens up when you need to login to a site, and you can choose how much information you want to release to the site. Interestingly, you can create and contribute something called a semantic map that lets Sxipper know how to fill out a form. Something of a social element in all this. Sxipper is also OpenID compatible so as that standard becomes more entrenched, you'll be able to more smoothly logon around the web.

One thing I am concerned about is the size of the extension: it weighs in a 2.1 MB, which is huge for a Firefox extension. Given that Firefox has a built-in password manager, and there are alternative form fillers, you might want to pass this up if space and speed are concerns. If not, Sxipper looks like a nicely designed tool for more efficiently managing your online identity.

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Remove Internet Explorer 7 Search Bar

One of the better features in IE7 is the search bar where you can quickly conduct a search and customize with the search engines of your choice. However, if you have a toolbar with a search bar built-in like Google Toolbar, you might not want an extra one cluttering up your screen.
Intelliadmin has figured out how to hide the IE search bar by modifying the registry, but first remember to backup your registry just in case:
Microsoft never put an option in the settings for IE 7 to disable or remove it, but you can set a registry key to make it go away.

If you open this key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Infodelivery\Restrictions

And create a dword value named "NoSearchBox" and set it to 1. The search box will be gone. Set it back to 0 and it will be back again.
Or, to do it the easy way, download their hide search bar utility.

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Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Online Version of MS Paint

There have been photo and image manipulation sites like Snipshot and Pixer.us, but none have tried to mimic MS Paint so precisely. CanvasPaint utilizes the canvas tag that Firefox 1.5, Safari 1.3, and Opera 9 support to re-create MS Paint as an online application. To save any creations you might make, go to File->Download. As proof of concept, it's impressive and shows how close we are to migrating to a web OS.
[via Google Blogoscoped]

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Online Maps May Have Led Kim Family Astray

I'm sure many readers have already read about the rescue of Kati Kim and her two daughters. Her husband, Cnet editor James Kim, is still missing however. What caught my eye is that online mapping services may have misled them into taking a more dangerous trail to get to the Oregon Coast. From the SF Chronicle:
Terri Stone, an innkeeper at the Tu Tu Tun Lodge in Gold Beach, where the Kims were to have stayed the night of Nov. 25, said the Bear Camp Road is shown on some Internet road-direction sites as the best way to get to the coast from Grants Pass, but she advises against it.
Many readers have probably discovered that online mapping sites like Google Maps are not 100% reliable. Typically, the shortest route is the one that's recommended, but this just goes to show that taking the shortest route isn't always optimal. Hopefully, some human judgment gets incorporated into the driving directions that are displayed.

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Second Life Contributes to Global Warming?

Your Second Life is about as costly as your first life. In ecological terms, that is. Nicholas Carr did the necessary calculations and found out that your average avatar consumes about as much electricity as an average Brazilian.
So an avatar consumes 1,752 kWh per year. By comparison, the average human, on a worldwide basis, consumes 2,436 kWh per year. So there you have it: an avatar consumes a bit less energy than a real person, though they're in the same ballpark.
...

More narrowly still, the average citizen of Brazil consumes 1,884 kWh, which, given the fact that my avatar estimate was rough and conservative, means that your average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian.

Where does global warming fit in? Dave Douglas ran the figures and found that
looking at CO2 production, 1,752 kWH/year per avatar is about 1.17 tons of CO2. That's the equivalent of driving an SUV around 2,300 miles (or a Prius around 4,000)
While there's nothing particularly new about the fact that data centers use exorbitant amounts of electricity, putting it in the context of Second Life does give it an interesting twist.

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Restore Crashed Sessions in Internet Explorer with IERescuer

With Internet Explorer 7, tabbed browsing was introduced, but there wasn't a good way to save or recover your tabs in case IE crashed or got accidentally closed. Yes, there is an option to have your current set of tabs reopened the next time you start IE, but you have to manually set it up each time.

Going to the rescue, IERescuer extends Internet Explorer's functionality by incorporating Firefox 2-like session restoring capabilities. You can restore crashed sessions as well as save your current session for later retrieval. It'll be free for the next 9 hours from Giveaway of the Day. Note that you have to install and activate it today.

IERescuer

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Pandora's Jar Saves MP3s from Pandora

Pandora's Jar lets you save streaming Pandora tracks as MP3s. A button called Grab This Track is added to the Pandora interface that lets you save one track at a time, or enable cruise control to grab all the tracks.

The setup instructions are a little complicated, but you can set up a batch file to do it for you. It's also possible to integrate Last.fm so you can see artist bios, album art, and other track information.

Like similar MP3 downloading services, there's a quasi-legal justification for using Pandora's Jar: it's simply a timeshifting tool like a VCR.

[via Lifehacker]

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Facebook Releases Firefox Toolbar

Although still primarily the haunt of college and high school students, Facebook has tried to appeal to a broader demographic by opening its doors to the general public and increasing web presence with little Facebook icons that let users share links.

Now, Facebook is looking to take up part of your screen real estate with a Firefox toolbar that lets you search Facebook profiles, get notified about pokes, friend requests, and new messages, interact with your friends' profiles in a sidebar, and share links and media. One annoying "feature" is that notifications appear as pop-ups, but thankfully they can be turned off.

The toolbar is a simple way to increase the stickiness of their offerings by making sure that wherever users surf to, they'll be able to access and interact with their Facebook friends. I'm a little surprised that MySpace hasn't gotten around to the releasing a toolbar, but then again Facebook's toolbar came out of left field. It's also a sign that MySpace and Facebook are headed on different trajectories and might not be such direct competitors as originally thought. MySpace is trying to avoid doing anything that might interfere with their monumental success while Facebook is busy experimenting in order to catch up.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

How'd You Say That with Howjsay

Don't know how to pronounce a word? Howjsay is here to help. It's a pronunciation dictionary that can help you pronounce about 33000 words. Just enter the word you're uncertain about, and hear it pronounced. You can mouse over the word (it'll be in pink) and hear it as many times as you want. The best part is that each word is pre-recorded so you won't be misled by synthetic pronunciations. The eponymous Dictionary.com has pronunciations as well, but it requires a premium account to access.

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More Free MP3s with Online Music Recorder

With Allofmp3.com possibly facing shutdown, alert music lovers will want to start looking for other sites to satisfy their cravings. Online Music Recorder (OMR) looks like a promising alternative. As Allofmp3 cloaked itself in a Russia legal loophole, OMR says its service is perfectly legal since it is only recording music from publicly available radio stations.

Given that, you won't see music downloads available immediately when you sign up for your account. The idea is that the radio recording starts only after you sign up. Wait a few hours, and you'll probably see hundreds of MP3s awaiting your pleasure. Songs by The Roots, Justin Timberlake, and Beyonce are among the selection.

Actually playing the files is trickier. Files are encrypted using an OMRKey so you'll need a piece of software called OMRDecoder to decrypt them. You'll also need to enter your account name and password to verify it's actually you. The process is a little long, but the end result is an MP3 file encoded at 128kbps.

[via P2P Blog]

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AskCity Is Local Search with Snapshots, Drawing Tools, and More

Ask joins Yahoo and Google in local search with AskCity, making it easy to find events, businesses, and movies where you live. Unlike its competitors, AskCity offers drawing and annotation tools along with the standard directions and aerial (satellite) view. You can add text labels, box an area, and send a permalink of your customized map to your friends. Another neat feature is a scrolling snapshots bar where you can store snapshots of maps as you browse through AskCity.If you're looking for restaurants, AskCity helpfully integrates CitySearch with its comprehensive database of restaurant information and reviews along with sample menus from MenuPages. You can also narrow by cuisine or neighborhood.

Overall, AskCity is a nice addition to the array of local search options now available. It's easy to use and has loads of features that make it easy to find what you're looking for and share what you've found.

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Microsoft Releases UniveRSS 3D RSS Reader

The Panel is Microsoft's attempt to innovate the user experience in Windows Vista and Live. Even better, the source code is available for each project. Right now, the only Vista application listed is UniveRSS, a 3D RSS reader.
It leverages the Windows Presentation Foundation and provides a stunning way of visualizing RSS feeds and their content. It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.
While the visualization is cool, I'm not too sure how practical it would be to actually use UniveRSS on a day-to-day basis. Yes, it would be useful to visualize just how much stuff you haven't read in your RSS feed collection, but the approach seems too cumbersome when you actually want to read an item. The 3D approach is good for seeing the forest, but not the trees.

Three dimensional visualization has been seen before in Microsoft's impressive Photosynth project, which allows 3D reconstruction of a photo collection.

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Anshe Chung is First Virtual Real Estate Millionaire in Second Life

Anshe Chung, the avatar of Ailin Graef in the virtual world Second Life, has announced that she is the first person (?) to become a virtual millionaire. You might have seen her on the cover (left) of BusinessWeek back in May. Second Life's virtual economy is run using Linden Dollars, which can be exchanged for US Dollars, and is primarily real estate based.
The fortune Anshe Chung commands in Second Life includes virtual real estate that is equivalent to 36 square kilometers of land – this property is supported by 550 servers or land "simulators". In addition to her virtual real estate holdings, Anshe has "cash" holdings of several million Linden Dollars, several virtual shopping malls, virtual store chains, and she has established several virtual brands in Second Life. She also has significant virtual stock market investments in Second Life companies.

Anshe Chung's achievement is all the more remarkable because the fortune was developed over a period of two and a half years from an initial investment of $9.95 for a Second Life account by Anshe's creator, Ailin Graef. Anshe/Ailin achieved her fortune by beginning with small scale purchases of virtual real estate which she then subdivided and developed with landscaping and themed architectural builds for rental and resale. Her operations have since grown to include the development and sale of properties for large scale real world corporations, and have led to a real life "spin off" corporation called Anshe Chung Studios, which develops immersive 3D environments for applications ranging from education to business conferencing and product prototyping.
Now, how soon do you think the German tax authorities come after Mrs. Graef's virtual assets?

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Ripping Blu-ray Movies with Your PlayStation 3

Those lucky few who have gotten their PlayStation 3's can now rip an exact copy of any Blu-ray disc if they're running Linux. Here's how it works:
Now that the PS3 can run full-blown Linux OS distributions like Yellow Dog Linux, Fedora Core (video), and others, users have found that ripping an exact copy of a Blu-ray movie (as well as PS3 games) is as easy as typing in the following command in the Terminal to create an ISO image: dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/blu-raymovie.iso. Of course, once you've created the file, you can then burn a Blu-ray disc with the ISO image if you have an external Blu-ray burner handy or – most likely the case – just play the movie back from its hard drive or attached storage

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Video Sharing Gets Scientific with JoVE

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) launched its first issue recently, and unlike most scientific journals, you won't have to dig through dense text to understand what's going on. Everything is video-based, and interestingly, there's a very YouTube feel to the whole thing. Videos have permalinks, are tagged, and can even be embedded in blogs or other sites. Sure, lectures and other academic events have been streamed online for a while now, but I don't think something that so closely mimics mainstream video sharing sites has been seen before. There's even a Web 2.0 vibe with the URL being myjove.com.

A sample video showing nuclear transfer in mouse oocytes is below:



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Sunday, December 03, 2006

Convert Any File with Media Convert

I was amazed to see the huge list of file types that Media Convert supports. It seems like almost any type of file conversion you could want can be accomplished through its web-based interface: text, images, videos, and audio. You simply upload a file or input a URL and choose the type of conversion you want done.

Some interesting conversion suggestions I saw on the site include converting a PDF to a SWF Flash file for easy viewing on a webpage, capturing a website as an image (essentially screen-capturing it), and converting text to morse code.

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Saturday, December 02, 2006

Million Dollar Homepage Creator Gets Into Lottery Business

Alex Tew, the enterprising student who started Million Dollar Homepage, is at it again. Before he was selling ad pixels on his site for $1 a pixel, but this time, he is looking to charge $2 with Pixelotto. There's a twist however. Apparently, he is planning on holding a lottery where one lucky winner who clicks on the right ad will win $1 million. It's a clever way to get people to click on ads, and it might work. Although the site launches December 5, he's already sold some of his inventory as you can see in the screenshot to the left.

What's interesting is that an arbitrage opportunity exists for smart advertisers who do decide to place an ad on the site. Since users have to click on every ad at least once to have a chance of winning, you're guaranteed a massive amount of traffic assuming Pixelotto takes off, which it has every chance to since $1 million is at stake, and a fair number of bloggers are writing about it. If even only a small percentage of visitors click on ads on your site, you can easily make back your original ad investment. Every user can only submit 10 entries a day, apparently, so depending on the length of the lottery, it might not be possible for a user to get through the entire ad inventory.

Tew has published this email letter about Pixelotto:
Hi

I have some very exciting news I’d like to share with you.

Next week, on 5th December, I am launching a new venture called ‘Pixelotto’.
It’s similar to The Million Dollar Homepage only this time I will be giving
away $1,000,000!

It’s all based around pixel advertising and generating big traffic for
advertisers. Visitors play for free - all they have to do is click on the
ads for chances to win the jackpot. The more they click, the more chances
they have - and the more traffic you receive.

As a valued customer of The Million Dollar Homepage, I’d like to give you an
exclusive opportunity to purchase advertising space on Pixelotto before the
site goes public. The world will be watching next week and this is your
chance to get on-board before everyone else.

The following link will give you exclusive access to Pixelotto, where you
can buy ad space right now:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXx

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to e-mail me and my team at
info@pixelotto.com

I look forward to welcoming you on-board for this new pixel adventure!

Cheers,

Alex Tew

Pixelotto
Pixelotto

Pixelotto Limited is registered in England & Wales. Company no. 05972757

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Free Physics, Computer Science, Engineering, and Biology Lecture Videos

Free Science and Video Lectures Online has a huge number of links to video lectures in all areas of science (physics, mathematics, chemistry) and engineering (computer science). It's a great resource for any students who find their professors lacking in teaching ability, anyone looking to self-study like ambitious high school students or adults, or just for fun (if science is your thing). I know I used to rely a lot on external lecture notes and videos when trying to figure out problem sets or studying for finals.

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Friday, December 01, 2006

Firefox Crop Circle Seen from Space

Firefox fans at Oregon State University dreamed up the idea of creating a Firefox crop circle and completed it in August. Only now has Google Maps been updated to include it.
Planned in under two weeks and completed in under 24 hours, the crop circle had a final diameter of 220 feet. We constructed the circle in an oat field near Amity, Oregon, where it was completely invisible from the road but unmistakable from the sky. Our team consisted of 12 people, mainly OSU students, and we carefully stomped down oats from 3:30pm Friday afternoon until 2:30am, putting on the finishing touches between 7:30am and 11:00am Saturday, August 12.
More on the step-by-step creation of the crop circle.

To see it in more detail in Google Earth, you'll need the coordinates, (45.123785,-123.113962). An overlay for Google Earth is available here.

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Report Spam to Google with Firefox Extension

SpamReport is a Firefox extension that lets you report search engine spam to Google in two clicks. You've likely encountered these spam sites in your search results when you clicked on a promising link that led you to a site that had nothing to do with what you were searching for. Previously, to report a site, you had to fill out a form and enter the original Google query, the URL of the page where results were displayed, and the suspicious page URL. A long and tedious process that probably discouraged many users from submitting a report.

Now, SpamReport fills in most of the fields for you, simplifying the process. However, I foresee this tool being used maliciously by webmasters looking to take out the competition. Adding a CAPTCHA to the form would be the easiest way to cut down on false reports.

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Line Rider Gets Updated with New Features

The amazingly popular Flash game Line Rider has been modded to become LineRider ZaDa, which includes many features that users have been clamoring for: an eraser, background lines, reverse floor function, and more. If you haven't played Line Rider before, you're missing out on a lot of fun.

You can see the new features in action below:



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Download Free Movies From AOL Tomorrow

AOL Video is giving away free movies for the holidays. Thirty different movies will be available for download starting 6 am ET tomorrow. Holiday themed movies as well as non-traditional ones like Spider-man 2 are among the selections. Movies are limited to one per person, but not one per computer.

[via TechCrunch]

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Create PDFs From Any Program with PDFCreator

PDFCreator is an open source application that lets you create PDF files from any program that's able to print. Once you install it, you can add a document that you want to convert to PDF, and PDFCreator will open it in the appropriate program like Word for a DOC file. The file is sent to the printer where it gets intercepted by PDFCreator and converted. Note that PDFCreator is temporarily set as the default printer when you do this.

Some other features:
  • Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
  • Send generated files via eMail
  • Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
  • AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
  • Merge multiple files into one PDF

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