Filed under: Office, Web services, Google, Web
Google Docs API now provides OCR service
If you're not a developer, you're probably not aware that Google Docs has an API available for various document-related services. Recently Google added a new feature that allows developers to create applications that will pass an image-based (.png, .jpg, or .gif) document to the API, and using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, generate and pass back an editable text-based document. Currently the service can handle documents up to 10 MB in size.
For non-developers, this is certainly interesting, but not terribly useful. Well, a live demo is available that will allow you to test the service yourself. At the time of this writing I was successfully able to convert a single page document, though there are reports that the service has become overloaded and is slow or sometimes fails to respond. Given that this is a demo, that's probably not terribly surprising.
If Google is exposing this functionality to developers, it seems at least possible that it could become a built-in feature of Google Docs for regular users at some point in the near future. With Google's recent acquisition of reCaptcha, it seems likely that Google's document-scanning capabilities will soon be better than anyone else's. That would make for an incredibly powerful feature for Google to offer its users.
[via Google Operating System]
If you've had a blog for any length of time, you've probably been assaulted with blog comment spam. Users of WordPress have the fantastic Akismet spam filtering tool freely available to them by Automattic, the makers of WordPress. But while Akismet is good (really good), it's not perfect. 
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
