Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with text

Help me save/extract text messages from an iPhone

QuantumMeruit — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:01:39 -0800

What is the "best" consumer-accessible solution to extract a text message (SMS/MMS) (or series of text messages) from an iPhone? I am looking for options to manage "traditional" text messages sent and received on company-owned iPhones. Free or cheap solutions that don't rely on cloud-based storage solutions would be ideal.

(Also ideal would be a solution that extracts as much of the information as would be recovered in a forensic-acquisition / device-seizure situation, without the associated cost and logistic difficulties.)

(The "don't conduct business via text message" train has long left the station.)

Previously (sort of, in 2010). (Not much update in 2011, either.)

Archival Digital Texts

dylan_k — Mon, 06 May 2013 09:12:31 -0800

I have inherited my grandmother's writings. I'm scanning them, doing OCR and in some cases retyping them so that I can have them digitized. I'd like to know, is there a format for text that is best for archival purposes? I was thinking of .rtf, since so many applications can open it. Is it considered "archival quality"?

How to create speech bubbles that look like they came from an iPhone?

sevensnowflakes — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:22:33 -0800

So I'm looking for a tool that will allow me to create text bubbles that look like they came from an iPhone. However, I don't want something like Fake iPhone Text, as that creates a picture of the entire phone background plus the text bubbles. I only want the text bubbles, disembodied. Does this exist? I'm sure if I had Photoshop I could probably create something, but I don't, and I'm not willing to shell out that much cash. Plus, I don't have any experience in image creation (and I'm not digi-artsy), so I'd greatly prefer using a tool that does the hard part for me. That said, I'd be willing to play around with some kind of free or low-cost image creation software if I absolutely had to.

Great text-to-video, fast, cheap, dummy-ready?

skypieces — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 21:10:15 -0800

I want to make YouTube videos of 2-3 minute text. The popular kinetic typography stuff and whiteboard stuff is eye-catching. But I have little video editing experience and suck at drawing. What is something simple I could use? This needs to be something I do myself, preferably computer-only (not camera). No outsourcing. I simply want to take short articles that I write, record the audio (which I can do easily already), and translate that to short, text-eye-candy videos that keep people's attention for 2-3 minutes. Topic: political/civic current events material. Need fairly quick turnaround (one hour, tops). Is there an online or software solution that "wizards" this together? I use a MacBook Pro.

Some quick examples for reference ...

Kinetic typography: http://youtu.be/J7E-aoXLZGY

Whiteboard animation: http://youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU

Simpler, stylized, scrolling text narration: http://youtu.be/-9huWlXFA1s

Anything interesting that I haven't seen that might fit the bill?

[Bonus Points for free or freeware solutions.]

Email to Google Voice SMS

humboldt32 — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:37:18 -0800

Can I email to a Google Voice number? I found this old AskMe:

http://ask.metafilter.com/141274/Sending-an-SMS-via-email-to-a-Google-Voice-number

Is this still not possible? I'd like to have an email auto responder send a message to a Google Voice number and have that message appear as an SMS on the phone associated with that Google Voice account.

Can you identify this unusual neurological (?) reading phenomenon?

zresearch — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 11:33:29 -0800

It's when "words fall away to pictures" occasionally , perhapps particularly when reading the text of physical books, usually novels, of a large size. It doesn't happen with reading online or e-book readers or textbooks. It's as if the visual imagination (without deliberate activation) overrides what's actually been seen by the eyes, so that the story unfolding is actually being "watched" in the mind's eye in an immersive, vivid way where one becomes virtually unaware of the actual text print and the outside world (so it's not even like watching a movie in a cinema, where there is more consciousness of the real surroundings). This is not just getting immersed in reading - the strong, and not deliberately activated, visualization is crucial. Based on anecdotal evidence, what I'm describing (not from my personal experience) appears to be a rarer rather than a common experience. Anyone have ideas what this neurological (?) trait might be?

What software can be used to crowdsource a transcription?

perpetualstroll — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:55:22 -0800

I am looking for an online service in which a group of volunteers could use to transcribe an audio or video file into text. Is there anything that will allow 10-15 volunteers to simultaneously log in and do this? I am familiar with services like CastingWords and others that allow you to pay to have people transcribe software, but I'm curious if anything exists for volunteers to contribute to a project.

How to avoid communication with the girl before the first date?

Atlantic — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 01:36:46 -0800

I met a girl at a bar and I want to know how to avoid chatting with her all week before our first date. Long story short, a friend of mine who bar-tends at a local university bar where I usually hang out, sneaks us into a private function the night of a hockey game we wanted to watch.

Turns out the private function was a speed dating/singles meet-up thing. Essentially my friends and I are sitting their without name tags watching the game and I decide to start chatting with one of the speed dating patrons standing next to me, inquiring about the whole process. We talk for a solid few hours, share some fries, a few drinks and exchange numbers. She texts me later that night, we have some small talk and I say good night. I then set up a date with her the next afternoon for the upcoming week. Unfortunately, both of us couldn't get together until this coming thursday for scheduling reasons.

Basically my question is: I feel like I really connected with this girl and I can tell she feels similar. However, I don't want to spend the week talking via text etc. because I want to save something for our first date. I also don't want either party to build any preconceived notions about each other before we've formally gone out to get to know each other.

How do I politely go about this when she continually tries to make conversation over text. Don't get me wrong, I like it but I just think it's a bad idea. We still have until thursday before going out...

Why does OSX Text to Speech occasionally garble/skip words on me?

carabiner — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:41:32 -0800

In order to reduce eyestrain when on the computer, I use the basic OSX (10.6.8) Text to Speech (System Prefs -> Speech -> Text to Speech) software for the computer to read out long-form articles found online. This works great! Except....sometimes when I ask "Alex" to read out to me it will skip or garble words from the highlighted article, usually one word per sentence or after x number of words. Why? If I stop the software while it's reading, I can usually get it to not skip words after highlighting the article again. I know it's not a word-recognition issue since Alex spells out the word if it's unknown, and it happens if I use the the print version of the articles or straight from the source. Again, it usually stops skipping words on the second go-around so I don't think it's 'reading' code from the websites. Why does it do this and what can I do to fix this? I don't need a fancy-pants speech software like JAWS since I only use this for long articles.

Specific Text Animation in After Effects

Thisispiggy — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 20:50:54 -0800

Looking for a text animation in After Effects Hey everyone!

I've been looking for making text animation in After Effects. I've seen it a few times, but I can't find any tutorials on it on Youtube.

Imagine having words on both the side and top of an invisible box. The side of the box faces you. When you flip the box forward toward you, the top of the box comes into view while the text on the side of the box gets flatter and disappears near the bottom.

It would be great if anyone can tell me how it's made or even have any idea of how it's done. It has been very frustrating for me to try to find it.

Thanks!

Site or application for logging text and photo messages?

daisyace — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 13:57:07 -0800

For a research project, we’re asking ~24 high school and college students to log their experiences with homework by sending us text messages and photos over the course of about two weeks. Is there a site where they can send those messages so that we could see them from a computer? There are particular features we’re seeking... What comes closest to satisfying them? Ideally:
-The students would be able to use any cell phone that can send text and photo messages, using that phone’s native messaging rather than an app.
-We’d be able to see all the posts from a computer.
-We’d be able to reply to the most recent post or to any along the way. Students could see the reply on their phone or on the site.
-We’d be able to see all the posts from all the students aggregated in one, searchable place.
-We’d be able to send a message to everyone at once, and even better, to subgroups and individuals as well.
-Students could opt to share the posts with just us or with all the other students in the project.
-Students could comment on other students’ posts shared with the group, and those comments would also be shared.
-The content would only be visible to those within the group.
-The tool would be reasonably current and accepted by students (no myspace-like options)
-The whole thing would be free or cheap, and require very little set-up/sign-up for the students.

So far, we’ve been considering:
-Posterous/Spaces (no longer accepting sign-ups)
-Text messaging (received only on phone, and not easy to manage group vs. individual messages...)
-Facebook (requires smartphone and app, not easy to manage group vs. individual messages...)
-Tumblr (not easy to set up a group...)
-Twitter (limits message length...)
-Flickr (photo-centric, requires smartphone and app...)
-dscout (not free/cheap, requires smartphone and app...)

Got anything that meets more of our criteria than these?

How to "copy on drag" text in Windows 7?

moxiequz — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:10:13 -0800

I need to copy text between a commercial text editor (TextPad 6.1.3 by Helios) and a home brew program used by my company. When I try to do this now, the highlighted text is moved/cut rather than copied. Is there a Windows 7 or TextPad setting I can use to force the behavior to copy rather than cut the text? Haven't had much luck with google, hoping there's a simple solution here. Some more possibly relevant details:

The Java program used by my company has an edit window which is the target of the text I want to copy. Changes to this program are not immediately possible so while I would be interested in hearing about them for future use, I'm more interested in Windows or TextPad settings I can alter immediately (if there are any of course).

Right clicking in the TextPad window doesn't bring up any obvious solutions. I'm not looking for "right click to copy", or keyboard shortcuts. I'm looking to alter the behavior on "highlight/drag". If there's another text editor that I can use which has the copy/drag behavior I'd be interested in that. Many thanks.

Emergency SMS notifications to staff

rhapsodie — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:27:45 -0800

Can you recommend a service that will let me broadcast SMS notifications to all staff in an emergency? I am assuming it would be an SMS marketing service, but if there are other options I'd love to hear them. The main feature I need is that it is easy and fast to send out a notification in an emergency. I did some searching on SMS marketing reviews, but it's near impossible to find a non-biased article: I just don't trust sites with urls like sms-marketing-reviews.smsmarketingreviews.com/sms-marketing-reviews.html

I lik ur profile

curuinor — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 18:25:14 -0800

How do I get a fair size (100+ messages) corpus of first-contact messages on dating sites? I have a weird text classification idea and I want to test it on real corpuses. By "first-contact messages on dating sites", I mean the first message from someone to someone else on a preferably general-audience dating site. Anonymous, of course, and it's OK if scrubbed of all identifying details, of course. A Googling doesn't bring up any results. Does such a thing exist publicly? What about a simulation of same?

Help me find this advanced text input APP that predicts your next letter

crawltopslow — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 08:08:08 -0800

Help me find this advanced text input APP that predicts your next letter I saw an app once that predicts the next letter you are going to type, and moves that letter near to where your finger is now. For example if you type W it will place 4 keys around the W (up down left right) and the keys would be H,A,E,O or something, (based on the most commonly typed letter after W) and I think it eliminated all keys that can't follow a W in English, like Q,Z,L etc.

I looked at it briefly and would like to find it again.

My description may be inaccurate in some places as I am going off fuzzy memory.
(I'm pretty sure it was for android)

Thanks a lot.

Using Google Voice (or similar) to forward calls and texts

Swede78 — Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:44:34 -0800

I'm considering porting my personal cell phone to Google Voice so that calls and texts can be forwarded to my newly acquired work cell phone. If you've done this, please see my specific questions/concerns. What I want to accomplish:

1) Save between $600-700/yr by cancelling my personal cell phone plan.
2) Not have to give any contacts a new phone number.
3) Not have to carry two phones.

From what I can see at Google Voice's website, I should be able to port my personal # to them for a $20 fee. After that, the service is free to use. It seems that I should not have a problem forwarding calls to my work phone. However, there are some questions/concerns I have:

A) I can't confirm whether or not text messages can be forwarded. Does anyone know if this is possible?
B) I assume that there is no way for calls from my new work phone to appear as they come from my personal #. If there is a way, please let me know.
C) If it's possible to forward text messages to my work phone and I reply, will the recipient see it come from my work #? I assume yes, but I'm asking just in case it's possible.
D) When the time comes that I want to port my personal # back to a cell phone provider, will I have any problems? Similarly, do I own my personal # or am I giving up any rights by porting it to Google?
E) Are there better alternatives to Google Voice? I don't mind paying a small monthly fee if it does everything else I mentioned.
F) Are there any issues that made you regret doing this?

Thanks for you time.

Backup texts to computer

lewedswiver — Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:51:15 -0800

How do I get my text messages off my phone? I have an Android LG Optimus V phone. My contacts on the phone are synced to my Gmail account. However, the text messages are are not synced, and exist only on the phone.

This question from 5 years ago (so likely out of date) is basically what I'm wondering -- what's the best way to backup my text messages to my computer?

In particular, if there was a way to back up the texts directly to my Gmail, so that the appropriate texts are associated with each contact, that would be great, but I don't know if that's possible.

At the very least, how do I back up the texts to my computer? In addition, if I get a new cell phone, would it be possible to connect the old texts with the new phone?

How to record and transcribe Skype conversation

NorthCoastCafe — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 11:38:48 -0800

What technology and software I should look at inorder to be able to record interviews on Skype on to my hard disk (MacBook Pro) and then be able to manipulate the recording easily in order to type out a transcript? Or, preferably , find reliable speech recognition software that will automatically produce a written transcript I can enter into my word processing program (Open Office.) ? I'm willing to change up software and able to spend no more than $100 to make this work. Is it possible?

Looking for the name of an old-school, plaintext Mac setup system

mph — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 15:11:57 -0800

Please help me track down an article (or documentation) about an OS9 Mac setup regime that was heavily text-based, emphasizing how to set up a Mac with keyboard macros, desktop-accessible text snippets and very specific keyboard macros. I read an article at some point in the last 15 years or so about a company with a very prescriptive setup process for employees using Mac desktops. It placed a heavy emphasis on using plain text, programming keyboard shortcuts or macros to accomplish common tasks.

The person who wrote up this workflow may have named it something like "The Good Desktop" or "Better Desktop" or somesuch, but I wouldn't face a firing squad over that detail.

I thought I remembered reading about it in Wired, but inurl:searches haven't netted me anything. If I had to pin it down in time, I'd guess it came up during the Danny O'Brien-fueled plain text/lifehacks mania that swept through the 'net ca. 2004, since it would have seemed very much like a precursor to that.

Creating an index of first lines

dylan_k — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 11:35:17 -0800

Creating an index of first lines, from a group of many poems, each stored in a seperate .txt file. Are there any applications or scripts that would help me to do that? Hello,

I've got about a hundred poems that I'm doing some research on and organization with, and I thought it would be nice to include an index of first lines (particularly because the authors titles changed over time a little bit)

Are there any applications or scripts that would help me to do that?

I keep forgetting to return texts.

xo — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 11:35:05 -0800

How do you keep track of your texts? I get texts that ask to set up drinks with a friend (or a playdate for my child), or asking how things are, or sending me a link to something silly to check out. If I can't answer then, inevitably a new text from someone else will come in later and I lose track of the unanswered one(s). This is an iPhone, by the way. Sometimes I manage to scribble down a note or email myself the text to remind me to get back to it later. But when I can't, it just gets lost in my text inbox because I've forgotten it came.

Is there a better/faster way to operationalize the coding of messy text data?

iamkimiam — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 11:24:13 -0800

I'm trying to tag and code about 4000+ unique paragraphs of data. These are opinion responses to two similar questions. I manually went through the first 4000 responses and it took weeks using Google Refine. I'm wondering if there's a way to operationalize this to be a bit easier and less time consuming? There are about 10 dimensions I'm coding for with tags, and the wording of the answers varies wildly. Here's an example of various responses to one of the dimensions:

"This is just how it is in my brain."
"I see it in my head like this."
"When I think about it, this is what I come up with."
"It's just the way it is, you know, inside my mind."
"Mind's eye sees it this way."

These responses would be preceded and followed by other text that's also important to me to code on other dimensions, so I don't want to replace the whole paragraph with a tag like 'in head', but rather add 'in head' to a series of tags for that response (separate by semicolons). The data is also very messy with punctuation, spelling, omissions and IPA/other character variation.

If you've done something like this, how did you go about it? I'm currently using Google Refine's cluster feature to collapse about 5% of the rows that are short and straightforward. Then manually adding semicolon-separated tags in a new column for the rest. It's very tedious.

Tools I am familiar with: Google Refine, SQL, Excel (yuck), Text Wrangler and some very limited command line stuff (terminal and awk, grep).

| What's The Font |

TangerineGurl — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 19:24:34 -0800

WhatTheFont| is throwing me gibberish on this 1970's Poster Inspiration Font So what is the font?
It's probably the first example I have of admiring words for the way they appear.

Any examples of Github projects with a main library and derivatives?

kristi — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 09:30:34 -0800

I want to create a github project consisting of a main library with derivative variations, such as Drupal and Wordpress plugins. Can you point me to existing projects with this kind of structure? I'd love to learn from existing projects that do it well. I'm interested in creating a github project that takes text input - for example, an article or a blog post - and outputs a list of keywords or topics ... a bit like a concordance generator.

I've never created a structured project like this before, and I'd love to learn from existing projects that do it well.

I'd like to make it flexible without falling into the trap of the never-completed too-many-options project.

Can you point me to existing github projects that have a similar approach and structure - a main set of functionality, probably as a library, but with derivative versions such as CMS plugins (Drupal, Wordpress, etc)?

PHP would be great, but other languages would be okay too.

Links to any resources that would be helpful or guidelines for best practices would also be most welcome.

Thanks!

The most watched digital content is... what?

Wordshore — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 10:09:57 -0800

Is Gangnam Style the most watched "piece of digital content" in human history? This article or post states that it is, and the wording is bothersome. Other places such as The Guardian are stating that it's the most popular YouTube video.

It could be argued that, though viewed 800+ million times, most of these are probably multiple views by the same people, so the number of distinct viewers is only a small fraction. Other "digital content" e.g. the first moon landing, the Olympics opening ceremony, the Beatles final performance, might have been viewed by more individuals. Complicating this is that "digital content" can reside in multiple places, even multiple instances on YouTube alone. And "digital content" extends to much more than just videos.

Google searches cloud the issue further. Basically, what is the most watched, viewed, examined or listened to (in terms of numbers of unique people) piece of "digital content" in history?