Most scanners and cameras nowadays come with some basic OCR software.  If you're not familiar with the term, Optical Character Recognition attempts to turn an image file into text, by recognising the pixels that make up each character.  Typically, it's used for turning scanned images of documents, newspaper cuttings, correspondence, books etc into small, indexable, searchable text files.  

If you don't have any such software, and you need to perform some OCR magic on a scanned image, there's a web service that can help.  www.free-ocr.com is, as the same suggests, an online OCR service that's free to use.  Just upload any image file of 2 MB or less, wait a few seconds, and the text is instantly displayed for you to copy and paste into a text editor or any other application.

If you're going to use such a service, a couple of caveats apply.  First, remember that everything runs on a remote web server, so it's best not to upload anything particularly confidential (or incriminating!).  Secondly, like all OCR software, this service works best if you experiment to find the best contrast settings for the source image.  Too little contrast, and accuracy goes out of the window. 

 Website: http://www.free-ocr.com

Have you ever stared in envy at people who have multiple monitors on their desktop PC, and wished you had enough money (and desk space!) to allow such a setup?  If you like the idea of multiple monitors but you don't have the space or money to implement it for real, then take a look at this great desktop extender application for Windows.

The program is called GiMeSpace (give me space!), and you can download it from various sites including http://download.cnet.com/GiMeSpace-Free-Edition/3000-2346_4-75042748.html.  It runs under Windows XP and above, and is completely free. The download is around 500 KB.

In use, the program is pretty simple.  Sadly, it won't actually give you any more screens, or make your desk larger, but it's still pretty handy.  Once the software is installed, moving your mouse to the right or left hand side of the screen causes the desktop to scroll sideways, revealing more space to open new windows.  And that's about it!  Very simple, and surprisingly useful.  It means, for example, that you can have lots of programs open in full-screen mode, and just scroll sideways to access them.  It's almost like having multiple side-by-side monitors.  

If you need to turn off the scrolling feature temporarily, just press the Scroll Lock key on your keyboard.  Or to close the program entirely, right-click the GiMeSpace icon in the taskbar and choose Exit.  

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