Archive for September 2013

Genius Scan

How to turn a smartphone into a scanner

By: Manoj Khadilkar

Once upon a time, a neighbor planning to go on a holiday, desperately wanted to scan their passport & other important documents but could not find access to a scanner. Situations like these are now in the past, thanks to a new app which tells you how to turn a smartphone into a scanner.

The Genius Scan – PDF Scanner – is a Free as well as Paid app. This new app works on the Android OS. What it essentially does is to turn the camera of your phone into a document scanner.  Genius Scan works exactly as if you would use the phone’s default camera app to take a photo of a document. The difference is in the way this app processes & exports features.

Genius ScanThere are many many more ways of learning how to turn a smartphone into a scanner with this app. The Genius Scan scanner technology includes smart page detection, perspective correction & image post-processing. Typically, when you take a photo of a picture, you are not perfectly aligned and the light is not perfect. Genius Scan takes care of that for you.

There are a lot of other situations where you can use Genius Scan. For example, you can take a picture of the whiteboard in your classroom & save it as a pdf file, archieve all your shopping & food bills, save handwritten notes or any other textual information that you come across into documents, & save these in your phone.

For using Genius scan, a user is first asked to select the area to be included. You are taken to a post-processing screen where you can Scan and rotate the page or document. You can export the scanned documents through email or by other means.

The Genius Scan has access to use all major sharing apps that you have installed.  All scanned documents are listed by the application in the main interface so that a user can access them easily

Genius Scan also has another unique feature: the new app will automatically enhance the image using a black & white to color palette. This app also allows for non-English characters in documents or titles.

And, the only difference between the Free & Paid versions is that the former has advertising while the latter does not.

Image Credit: Genius Scan/Google Play

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Keep mobile phone data safe whenever you plug into a strange port

USB CondomsMost of us always wonder while plugging our mobile phones in “common” or “strange” ports – How to keep my mobile phone data safe? Will my phone get hacked? Will I lose data?

Keep those worries away because one company has found a way out of it. Called USB Condoms (it tells you about its functionality in one stroke), it prevents accidental data exchange when your device is plugged in to another device with a USB cable. Made by a company called int3.cc USB Condoms achieves this by adding a protective layer that fits on top of a USB plug, cutting off the data pins in the USB cable & allowing only the power pins to connect through. Thus, these “USB Condoms” prevent attacks like “juice jacking”.

Use USB-Condoms to:

* Charge your phone on your work computer without worrying…

* Use charging stations in public without worrying…

If you’re going to run around plugging your phone into strange USB ports, at least be safe about it, hence the name of this product.

Image Credit: int3.cc

 

 

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