One of the biggest issues I encounter when hunting for one of those obscure and uncommon Unicode characters is the fact that there’s thousands and thousands of them in total. I’ve managed to memorize key combinations for the most useful ones (such as the ellipsis), but it’s tough to squeeze too many of them into your brain. Shapecatcher.com eases your pain by allowing you to find that special character by using your visual memory.

We’ve gone over several solutions to finding special symbols before, but this one is really unique. Using Shapecatcher.com, you only have to draw the character that you’re looking for and you are then presented with a list of possible results. It couldn’t get much easier!

How to Use Shapecatcher.com

It’s very simple:

1. Visit http://shapecatcher.com/
2. Draw the character that you’re looking for in the box:
   
3. Click “Recognize” beneath the box
4. Your results will then appear beneath the box:
   

Shapecatcher.com’s database is huge, currently with 10,877 characters. They do not currently have support for Japanese, Korean and Chinese but do have plans to add that additional support in the future, which would expand their database pretty greatly.

They also offer a page to download fonts so that you can have typeface support for these Unicode symbols within your respective operating system.

On the more technical side, Shapecatcher.com’s Drawbox is reliant on HTML5 and it works very impressively. You’ll notice that the drawing-to-characters matching is incredibly fast, and here’s a quote directly from the website in regards to that:

Each query on this website is processed by a graphics card, making the comparsion process over 15 times faster than on my CPU. In essence, CUDA makes it possible to provide a near realtime expierence and to handle higher loads on this website.

Shapecatcher.com is the real deal and its drawing-matching algorithm is very accurate and works quite nicely, even if you’re terrible at making simple sketches (like me). Here’s a great example.

A simpler solution could be  CopyPasteCharacter, where you can register and create a personal collection of your most-used special characters. CPC and Shapecatcher.com in unison could make for an incredibly useful combination. CPC is one of the many symbol applications that we’ve reviewed here at MakeUseOf.

If you dumb things down one step further, you’ve still got Windows’ Character Map to play around with!

It’s the simplest and most convenient alternative to Shapecatcher.com. I’d only recommend putting extensive use towards Shapecatcher when you’re looking for a very specific and uncommon special character. Otherwise, most of what you need should be here (or on OSX’s alternative).

Shapecatcher.com is a great display of the HTML5 technology and a fresh and unique way to find those interesting little Unicode characters we all sometimes must hunt for. Looking for more special symbols? We’ve published articles on smiley face symbols and their meanings, keyboard techniques to create such symbols, and a simple tutorial on how to use your keyboard’s number pad as a tool to hotkey these characters.

Let me know what you guys think about Shapecatcher.com in the comments!

Need Web Developers near Denver?
Get 8 Free Quotes:

Telnet is one of those tech terms you may occasionally hear, but not in an ad or a feature laundry list of any product you may buy. That’s because it’s a protocol, or a language used to talk to computers and other machines; not only that, but Telnet is actually ancient in Internet terms, dating back from 1973.

So what is Telnet, and what is it good for, anyway?

A Concise Definition

Wikipedia’s terse definition of Telnet is:

Telnet is a network protocol used on the Internet or local area networks to provide a bidirectional interactive text-oriented communications facility using a virtual terminal connection.

Wow, that’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down for the rest of us, term by term. If there’s a term you already know, feel free to skip it.

• Network protocol: That’s basically a language, a way for machines to talk to one another.
• Bidirectional: That means Telnet is not one-way; it can be used to send and receive information.
• Interactive: That means Telnet basically expects a live user on one end of the line. Telnet is not usually used for computers to talk autonomously with each other, but was built from the ground up to be human-readable.
• Text-oriented: Telnet is a text-only protocol; you won’t see graphics or fancy images while working with Telnet, nor will you be able to transfer files with Telnet.
• Virtual terminal: Historically, a terminal was a “dumb” computer, with only a keyboard and a screen and no powerful built-in processing facilities. Modern computers can take on the role of a terminal (i.e, open a communications session with another computer), but they are not “real” terminals (their hardware is more powerful). Thus, they are virtual terminals.

Now that we have gone over these, go back and read the Wikipedia definition again. Does it make more sense?

To sum it up in simple terms, Telnet is used to communicate with other computers and machines in a text-based manner. A telnet session looks something like this:

That’s not very visually exciting, but this single screenshot shows all the elements in the definition. You can see that I’m communicating with a network host, and communication is bidirectional and interactive (the host displays text, and then awaits an Enter key press to continue). No image is in sight, so that covers the “text-oriented” part. Last but not least, you can see that the Telnet session is actually running in a Windows 7 window, which means my computer is a “virtual” terminal.

The Most Important Thing You Should Know About Telnet

The one thing you should know about Telnet is that it is not a secure protocol. When you log into a remote host using Telnet, your username and password are sent “in the clear” – meaning, in plain text and not encrypted in any way. That means your credentials can be (relatively) easily intercepted and used to gain access to that device. For this reason (and many others) Telnet has been largely replaced by the more secure SSH protocol.

So What Is It Good For?

So Telnet is text-based, and is not secure. But that doesn’t mean there’s no use for it. There are two common uses for Telnet:

• Configuring network devices: What you see above is a screenshot from my own ADSL router; this is a thoroughly modern router with a Web interface and all, but it also accepts incoming Telnet connections from the local LAN. That means if I ever want to configure it via Telnet, I can.
• Participating in online communities: Telnet’s text-based nature, and the fact that a Telnet session often looks like something from the early Seventies, actually make it ideal for online communities. The Telnet BBS Guide lists 375 different BBSes (bulletin board systems) which you can participate in using Telnet. A typical BBS looks something like this:

What you may find inside varies widely; perhaps it’s ancient and deserted, and perhaps there’s a small and close-knit community of users just waiting to be discovered. Who knows?

And of course, Telnet can also be used for plain old fun:

If this scene looks familiar, it’s because it’s part of Star Wars, the ASCII edition. You can check it out at telnet://towel.blinkenlights.nl or on YouTube.

Image Credit : ShutterStock, ShutterStock, ShutterStock

Need Web Design?

Need Web Design?

Need Web Design?