Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Google currently supports more than 80 APIs that developers can use to integrate Google services and data into their applications. *  X-Ray for Movies & TV is a feature available on Kindle and Wii U devices that enables Amazon Instant Video viewers to easily and seamlessly learn more about the video they’re watching. It is designed to enrich the experience of watching movies and TV shows by embedding IMDb’s content into the Amazon Instant Video viewing experience.  On books, X-Ray lets you trace characters, places, and ideas as you journey through chapters, using information from Shelfari, YouTube, and Wikipedia. * The eight Harry Potter movies earned over 7 billion worldwide. *  HDFC Bank Ltd is the leader in mobile banking with 38.2% market share in FY15, followed by ICICI Bank * The main business of Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation as its name implies should have been catering but it makes more money from onl...

This Week I Learned - * Each Azure subscription supports up to 50 storage accounts (so 500 TB (for each Azure storage account * 50 = 25 Petabytes)  and therefore 25 Petabytes * Affinity groups are no longer recommended, or required for virtual networks .  No longer do you need to explicitly group resources in close proximity to each other to minimize latency between items like VNETs, VMs, and storage .  Improvements to the Azure virtual network infrastructure have made communication between different parts of the Azure DC very quick . *  Azure API Management  service lets you take existing backends and project a mobile-friendly, modern RESTful URL structure, transform XML to JSON on the fly, without costly modification work involving engineering teams and months of waiting. *  Twitter , GitHub, StackOverflow, Instagram, Snapchat, Flickr use Redis in some form or the other. Redis is an open-source advanced key-value cache and store....

There are free tools like PDFRider that let you manipulate PDF files and do things like extracting only some pages from a PDF document & packaging them into a new PDF. But why bother installing tools when Google Chrome browser can do that for you. Chrome can open not just web pages but also local PDFs. You don't need a PDF reader anymore if all you generally do is scroll through them. With the Print option of Chrome, you can save any web page as a PDF. What's more, you can extract sets of pages from a PDF document or specific pages of a web page to a new PDF by specifying page ranges separated by a comma. This is not a common use case but remember when you face such a scenario, you don't need any other utilities. Also see:  HOW TO bulk archive a web page along with linked pages in PDF format - needs IE