“Want to convert your Sinhala pdfs or images into texts? Sinhala OCR is now available with Google Docs. Simply open your image/pdf with Google Docs and scroll down to see the magic!”
This little snippet of tech news was shared with us by Googler Keshan Sodimana, who’s known for breaking all the cool Google stuff to the Sri Lankan social media communities long before media get around to doing it. While Sinhala OCR has been worked on for some time, especially by the UCSC’s Language Technology Research Laboratory, current implementations tend to be of the offline variety. Don’t expect this solution to be perfect, but it’s a huge step up from what we had before.
“If you’ve got a URL as long as an anaconda…”
Thambaru Wijesekara of Ceylon Systems blogged about a local URL shortener that they’ve come up with called Twt.lk. It’s really quite simple – paste URL, shorten, done. The cool thing is that it lets you track visits to that URL by signing up with Facebook, your email or G+. We shortened Readme.lk and ran it through GTmetrix to see just how much of a lag is introduced, and we got a page load time of 3.92 seconds versus our usual 2.7-2.8 time. Not bad for use on Twitter.
