Few days back we reported that Dell has announced Project Sputnik,
a six month research effort to explore the possibility of creating an
open source Ubuntu laptop targeted directly at developers.
Dell has now announced that the experiment was successful and they were surprised by the amount of interest it has generated.
“Since we announced project
Sputnik a little over two months ago, we have continued to be amazed by
the amount and quality of interest and input we have received,” said Barton George, project Sputnik lead and director Dell’s web vertical marketing.
As the project has matured, Dell is now taking Project Sputnik from pilot to product this fall.
It plans to deliver an official developer laptop based on the Dell XPS
13 with Ubuntu 12.04LTS preloaded, available in select geographies.
Made possible by an internal
innovation fund, the system will offer developers a complete
client-to-cloud solution. The included software will allow developers to
create “microclouds” on their laptops, simulating a proper, at-scale
environment, and then deploy that environment seamlessly to the cloud.
The solution is based on the current high-end configuration of the Dell
XPS13 laptop: 13.3 inch screen with edge to edge glass (1366x768
resolution), i7 2GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor, 4GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD,
0.88 x 12.56 x 9.3 dimensions and 2.99 lbs weight. Check out XPS13
product page here.
The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s
and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet
according to Google (search for filetype:pdf).
There are several
reasons why the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts
of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even
legal forms.
PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
Unlike
Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file
cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from
printing or copying text from PDF documents.
You can open a PDF
file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe
Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins
and it can create PDFs.
Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat
While
PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can
edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the
source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe
Acrobat.
We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file
An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks
Sometimes you need to
make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide
your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or
may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.
With
PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool
or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes
and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web
documents.
[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we
aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding
certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over
that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.
Change Metadata of PDF Files
If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit.
This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF
document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as
well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the
password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF
metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line,
you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.
[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should
consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help
improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.
Edit the Text of a PDF File
If
you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the
source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an
editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the
contents of the PDF.
Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft
Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF
format using any PDF writer.
If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza
to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes
images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF
to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.
Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)
Now
that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of
PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced
editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing
blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.
First there’s PDF XChange,
a free PDF viewer and editor that you also may use for typing text
directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you
may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.
Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.
Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape
With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including
text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or
even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate
PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in
pencil tool.
The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension.
OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a
PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color,
increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default
font-family, etc.
Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also
includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc.
but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.
The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone
installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.
When you send an email to someone, the message goes to an SMTP server
which then looks for the MX (Mail Exchange) records of the email
recipient’s domain.
For instance, when you send an email to hello@gmail.com,
the mail server will try to find the MX records for the gmail.com
domain. If the records exist, the next step would be to determine
whether that email username (hello in our example) is present or not.
Using a similar logic, we can verify an email address from the computer without actually sending a test message. Here’s how:
Let say that we want to verify if the address billgates@gmail.com exists or not?
Step 1. Enable telnet in Windows. Or if you already have the PuTTY utility, skip this step.
Step 2. Open the command prompt and type the following command:
nslookup – type=mx gmail.com
This
command will extract and list the MX records of a domain as shown
below. Replace gmail.com with the domain of the email address that you
are trying to verify.
Step 3.
As you may have noticed, it is not uncommon to have multiple MX records
for a domain. Pick any one of the servers mentioned in the MX records,
may be the one with the lowest preference level number (in our example,
gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com), and “pretend” to send a test message to
that server from you computer.
For that, go to command prompt window and type the following commands in the listed sequence:
3a: Connect to the mail server:
telnet gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com 25
3b: Say hello to the other server
HELO
3c: Identify yourself with some fictitious email address
mail from:<labnol@labnol.org>
3d: Type the recipient’s email address that you are trying to verify:
rcpt to:<billgates@gmail.com>
The
server response for ‘rcpt to’ command will give you an idea whether an
email address is valid or not. You’ll get an “OK” if the address exists
else a 550 error like:
abc@gmail.com – The email account that you tried to reach does not exist.
support@gmail.com – The email account that you tried to reach is disabled.
That’s it! If the address is valid, you may perform reverse email search to find the person behind the address. And if you get stuck somewhere, this step-by-step video should help:
You get an email from a person with whom you have never interacted
before and therefore, before you reply to that message, you would like
to know something more about him or her. How do you do this without
directly asking the other person?
Web search engines are obviously
the most popular place for performing reverse email lookups but if the
person you’re trying to research doesn’t have a website or has never
interacted with his email address on public forums before, Google will
probably be of little help.
No worries, here are few tips and online services that may still help you uncover the identity of that unknown email sender.
#1. Find the sender’s location
Open the header of the email message and look for lines that say “Received: from” followed by an IP address in square brackets. If there are multiple entries, use the IP address mentioned in the last entry.
Now paste the IP address in this trace route tool and you should get a fairly good idea about the location of the email sender
#2. Reverse email search with Facebook
Facebook has 450 million users worldwide and there’s a high probability that the sender may also have a profile on Facebook.
Unlike
LinkedIn and most other social networks, Facebook lets you search users
by email address so that should make your job simpler. Just paste the
email address of the sender into the Facebook search box and you’ll immediately know if a matching profile exists in the network.
If
you are able to locate that person on Facebook, download his profile
picture and then upload it to Google Images (click the camera icon in
the search box). This acts as a reverse image search engine so you can locate his other social profiles where he may have used the same picture.
#3. Check all the other Social Networks
You can use a service like Knowem to quickly determine if a profile with a particular username exists in any of the social networks.
If
the email address of the send is something like green_peas@hotmail.com,
there’s a probably that he or she may have created accounts of some
other social network using the same alias “green_peas” – put that in knowem.com to confirm.
#4. People Search
Finally, if nothing works, you should try a people search service like Pipl and Spokeo – both services let you perform reverse email lookups but Spokeo has a more comprehensive database than Pipl.
Other
than regular web documents, Spoke also scans social networks and even
the whois information of domain names to find any bit of information
associated with an email address. However, some of the results returned
by Spokeo are only available to subscribers.
