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- Cool Websites and Tools [June 23]
- The 8 Best Book Review Sites
- Hacking Tips: Download Free Games for Your iPod
- 3 Useful Websites for Free Downloadable Resume Templates
- How To Twitter Quickly from Firefox, IE, Opera and Chrome
- Backup Program Data & Personal Settings with FBackup
Cool Websites and Tools [June 23] Posted: 23 Jun 2009 04:00 PM PDT
(1) Cloverr - Web service that acts as an online hard drive for storing files from all over the internet. Instead of uploading files from your local hard drive it lets you save online files such as Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Google Maps etc. Adding files is easy, simply click "New File" and then select the source from where you want the file to be uploaded. Read more: Cloverr: Online Hard Drive For Storing Web Content (2) Curculator - Easy to use currency converter and calculator. Select the input and the output currency, and enter the amount and it will give you the result in no time. The rates of Curculator are mid-market, i.e. average of the buy and sell rates and are extracted from various trusted sources. Read more: Curculator: Currency Converter And Calculator (3) Filmaster - New social networking site for movie fans with personalized content and recommendations. Users can run their own movie blog where they can rate and review movies. It also helps them to connect with others who has a similar taste in movies. The recommendation engine suggests movies based on what users and their friends have rated and reviewed. Read more: Filmaster: Social Network For Movie Fans (4) Popixy - Tabbed search engine that makes it easy to search multiple sites simultaneously. It produces different types of search results such as YouTube videos, news from Google news, images, web search, forum search and Twitter, all on one page in a tabbed interface. The best part - it is very fast in displaying the results and you can quickly flip between the tabs to navigate all kinds of information about your query. Read more: Popixy: Quick Tabbed Search Engine (5) SongKick - This site lets you browse the entire concert history of popular musicians and bands, with over 1 million past and upcoming concerts in its database. Select your favorite artist and browse his/her concert history by date, by venue and city and even find out with which other musicians the artist played the most concerts. Read more: SongKick: Check Entire Concert History Of Favorite Bands
These are just half of the websites that we discovered in the last couple of days. If you want us to send you daily round-ups of all cool websites we come across, leave your email here. Or follow us via RSS feed. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts | ||
Posted: 23 Jun 2009 02:00 PM PDT
So what's a book review? And what makes a book review good or bad? The first question has a simple answer. A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and originality. Its length can vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay. But what makes a book review good is totally up to the reader – personal taste. While some may prefer a short plot summary, some may prefer a long essay on the concepts presented in the book, along with the author's personal opinions. That's why the order in which these sites are presented does not matter. The New York Times
The New York Times, while some critics say it has fallen from the top ranks, still has capable writers which undoubtedly have the skills necessary for writing book reviews. Writing book reviews is actually very hard and requires the utmost attention to detail as well as an encompassing knowledge of other literary works. The reviewer must analyze even the faintest clues, implied meanings provided by the book author, decide on their importance and meaningfulness to the story. He has to address complex issues such as plagiarism and decide on the validity of the ideas and points expressed. The New York Times presents us with book reviews situated somewhere in the middle, between a plot summary and a ten page essay, with most reviews situated around 1000 words. The quality varies from writer to writer but most of them provide an insightful view for the proto-reader. They have one of the largest number of reviews, which means you're going to visit them sooner or later. Overall, The New York Times Book section receives a warm recommendation. Visit it here. Also worth mentioning – capturing almost the same type of writing and quality – are the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and The Telegraph. AllReaders.com
Next up is AllReaders.com, with a design stuck in 1999, the apogee of humanity according to the Matrix. Their library is comprehensive and the search engine highly customizable, but the reviews are generally short and superficial. “Gordon invites readers, authors and publishers to enter books and reviews in a process that takes about 10 minutes," and that's exactly the problem with the site. Instead of knowledgeable readers and writers, you will sometimes risk finding a common illiterate species: the internet troll. The advantage of reading through many viewpoints is undeniable so go on and visit it here. BookPage.com
BookPage gives us a consistent library of well written book reviews, including a section on children's books, blogs and a newsletter. Nothing remarkable, but still worth a read. Visit it here. BookReporter.com
Just slightly better organized than the other sites I visited, bookreporter.com hosts reviews about 500 words long, polls, blogs and various contests aimed at the diligent reader. As always, you're invited to join the conversation, so post in the comments suggestions on other sites you’d like to read before buying a book as well as impressions on the ones mentioned in this article. You could even recommend us a book! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts | ||
Hacking Tips: Download Free Games for Your iPod Posted: 23 Jun 2009 12:00 PM PDT
However, before I switched Windows Mobile, getting some decent games on my pre-historic cellphone was pretty much impossible, and one doesn’t string a PSP around his neck all day and expect to be popular with the ladies. So, imagine my joy when I discovered that there are free games for iPod that I can download! These games, which were mainly meant to be downloaded from the iTunes store, could help you kill that little time that was still moving, and although gaming sounds highly impractical with a scroll-click-weel and a center button, they’re great fun. However, paying for these games gets old quick. Especially because you’re paying 5 bucks (or 5 Euros - people really don’t seem to know how to convert prices) for games you’ve played in your browser a few years ago, like Tetris and music quizzes. The problem with the iPod’s freeware games market is Apple’s overprotectiveness. It’s not easy to put games on your iPod that weren’t bought in iTunes. But today, we’re going to show you how it’s done. Note that the iPods supported by this tutorial are the iPod Video 5G and 5.5G (pictured above). Trying this with iPod Nano’s, iPod Classics, or any of the newer models will be bound to result in failure (and there is no other alternative but installing Linux on your device). Either way, everything described in this tutorial, you do on your own risk. MakeUseOf is not responsible for any potential problems, or damage to your iPod. Let’s get started, shall we? Prepping your iPod for free gamesThe process consists of three parts. First, we’re going to make sure iTunes won’t undo all our hard work with the next synchronisation. Then, we’ll need to copy the necessary files and folders to our iPod, and finally, we’re going to patch our firmware. Configuring iTunes First of all, let’s fire up iTunes and disable a few options. In Devices - iPod - Options in the Summary tab, make sure that Enable disk use is checked.
Also, go to the Games tab and disable the Sync games box.
Now, close up iTunes and make sure your iPod is mounted. If not, remove it and plug it in again. Moving the files Next, configure Windows Explorer to display hidden files and folders. If you’re using XP, go to Tools - Folder Options. On Vista, this option can be found in Organize - Folder and Search Options. In the View tab, make sure Show hidden files and folders is enabled.
Open your mounted iPod in Windows Explorer and navigate to iPod_ControlGames_RO and extract the hex folder of your downloaded games. Read more about where to get these games at the bottom of the article. Patching your iPod For this one, you’ll need to download iPodWizard (v1.3) and the right firmware file - 5G or 5.5G. If you don’t know for certain which you need, the 5.5G iPod is the one with search function. Fire up iPodWizard and make sure the edit mode is set to Firmware File. Then, browse to the correct firmware. Finally, press Write to iPod and follow the directions on your screen.
Congratulations, you should now be able to find your games on your iPod under extras. Have fun! Download Free iPod GamesIf you do a quick Google search, a few sites will pop up where you can find free games for your iPod that you can download, one of those sites is Emobilez. This site offers a wide variety of free mobile/portable software, and has a healthy arsenal of games as well. Although I’ve got my doubts with some of them (e.g. Lost and Zuma), all games are believed to be in the public domain. How do you find gaming on your iPod? What are your favorite iPod games? Let it all out in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts | ||
3 Useful Websites for Free Downloadable Resume Templates Posted: 23 Jun 2009 10:00 AM PDT
So, you can use all the help you can get. I am going to show you a few sites where you can grab free downloadable resume templates. Some of the templates are in PDF format and some of them are in Word format. The first thing you should do is grab an old copy of your resumé or a list of your past jobs and accomplishments. That will help you immensely when you need to replace the generic information with your own. The first site I found has very generic templates that will allow you to totally customize the resumé. This is just for the formatting, there is little to no content that you will be able to use. These are called Blank Resumé Templates and can be found here: http://www.professional-resume-example.com/free-blank-resume-template.html They offer three types of resumé templates and they are Chronological format, Functional Format and Combination. We will show you each of them here with a link to their respective PDFs
And then there is the combination of the both of them:
And next up, we have http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/quickstart with their resumé section located at http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/quickstart. The difference between these two sites is that Collegegrad breaks up their resumés by major. So, you can find a more specific resumé geared towards you to customize. I choose computer science and got this: http://www.collegegrad.com/resumes/quickstart/compsci.doc
And last but not least, http://www.easyjob.net has free downloadable resumé templates broken down in 3 categories:
And best of all – all this information is FREE! Between this site and browsing other people's resumés on Monster.com, Hotjobs.com or any of the other popular job seeking sites you can customize your resumé and make it pop! Remember a direct cover letter is just as important as a great resume! Do you have a favorite free resume template website? Maybe you have some other job seeking tips? Well, if you do, leave them in the comments! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts | ||
How To Twitter Quickly from Firefox, IE, Opera and Chrome Posted: 23 Jun 2009 08:00 AM PDT
Though Twitter is all pervasive, I have found that twittering becomes easier if it's always in my face and married into the tools I use almost as a habit for my daily web hops. Mark's comprehensive post on Tools, Apps and Bots to Improve your Twitter Experience became my first roadmap as I surrendered myself to the Twitter universe. Mark put in mentions about how to Twitter from some of the popular instant messengers and even from the command line. To further my own user experience, I started looking for ways to say my 140 bytes worth in an uncomplicatedly fast way sans frills from the browsers I use often and almost live in. With the popularity of Twitter, it wasn't like looking for a needle in a haystack. Twitter Addons for FirefoxCloudBerry TweetFox for Firefox brings micro-blogging to the browser. This Firefox addon for Twitter lets you tweet excerpts you like from websites with a click of the button and attach a short URL to the source page. Download and install the Firefox experimental add-on. Restart your browser and add your Twitter username and password through the options dialogue of the add-on: Tools – Add-ons - CloudBerry TweetFox 1.0 – Options.
Select an excerpt from any interesting website and click on the Twitter icon on the toolbar. Tweet the selected text (or any message) from the TweetFox box. Optionally, you can also include the source URL courtesy of the URL shortening service from Chilp.It. Of course, make sure that the entire message is within the 140 character limit of Twitter.
The latter versions expectedly will see support for multiple Twitter accounts and also a feature to send replies. TwitterBar is a similar add-on which uses the address bar to do the job. David has covered it in a previous post on 9 Ways To Use Twitter - No Website Necessary. Twitter Addons for Internet ExplorerAs above, CloudBerry's Twitter addon for Internet Explorer does the same job. TweetIE installs as a toolbar in IE. If it is not visible, select View – Toolbars – CloudBerry Twitter plugin. On first use, the plugin asks for your username and password.
Write your own text or select text from any website and click on the Twitter toolbar icon. Your 140 character limited message can now be dispatched with a click.
Twitter Addon for OperaIf it's add-ons and plug-ins with the last two browsers, then it's widgets with Opera. More exactly, the Twitter Opera Widget. The widget is light and installs in a jiffy. It can be accessed from the Widgets menu on the toolbar. After logging in, this is how Twitter addons for Opera looks like –
The little menu on the top gives you access to all your tweets. Posts and updates are almost concurrent. On the minus side, unlike the Twitter tools for IE and Firefox, the Opera widget lacks a URL shortener. But as a simple lightweight Twitter tool, it scores. Twitter Addons for ChromeChrome so far lacks Firefox's add-on richness or Opera's widget gallery. Though, Chrome extensions are on fast track development… till then, it’s a little bookmarklet that I must fall back on. Twitlet (beta) is a Twitter javascript bookmarklet service that lets you post from the convenience of your browser.
Twitlet is fast and simple. All you have to do is insert your Twitter log-in details to get the bookmarklet. Drag it to your browser's toolbar and start using it with messages or selected texts. #link or #this can be used to insert the current page's shortened URL.
Big Tweet is a similar service but it gives better text control over Twitlet. Using the bookmarklet, you can post to Twitter or Friendfeed. With Big Tweet, you can post highlighted text from any webpage with a shortened URL. A significant plus is that it lets you easily insert special characters in your messages for that emotional appeal.
Big Tweet as a bookmarklet also runs with Firefox, IE and Safari. If I knew that we would be so keen to follow each other's lives in 140 characters or less, I would have jumped in sooner. Are you are already in the deep end or are you a new believer like me? Either way, you can take a walkthrough of our huge list of posts on things that are Twitter. And of course, don't forget to comment or tweet on days spent with Twitter. Related posts | ||
Backup Program Data & Personal Settings with FBackup Posted: 23 Jun 2009 06:00 AM PDT
You can download and install Fbackup from here. Once installed, you can create backup jobs to quickly backup the files you want. Create a job, specify the destination you want to backup to (local, external or network), specify the directories, include or exclude files using wildcards, encrypt and password protect the backed up files and you have a backup job set up.
You can then specify if you want to run any actions before or after the backup and schedule when you want to run your backups. So far so good, it does pretty much everything you would expect of a backup program. But wait, there is more, something that sets Fbackup apart from other backup software out there. Its the plugins. Fbackup supports plugins that help you take better backups of your program data. What is program data, you ask? As an example let’s consider Firefox, all the extensions you install, bookmarks you create and other tweaks and customizations you perform — constitute the program data for Firefox. Something that doesn’t come with the software, and something you might lose if your hard drive crashes or if you re-install the operating system.
The savvy users would suggest to take backups of the %APPDATA% directory, that would include program data for a number of your programs. However, Fbackup makes the task even easier and almost a no-brainer with the help of plugins.
All you have to do is visit the plug-ins page (it’s for Fbackup and Backup4All-another backup solution from the same developer but not free) and download the required plugin. There are plugins for a wide range of software. You can find plugins for Firefox, iTunes, RoboForm, Pidgin, Photoshop, Picasa to mention a few. Each plugin gives you a simple way to backup your profile/settings in that program so that you can easily restore it later. Once you get plugin on your side of the tubes, go to Tool > Plugins. You can add, remove, enable disable the plugins from in here. With the plugins added, you can now find the corresponding entry under the sources tab when setting up backup jobs. Here is an example with the Firefox backup plugin installed:
Fbackup really makes it easy to backup program data along with other important files. The interface is clean and easy for the regular user without too many options. It would be interesting to know what backup solution you would use? Would you consider Fbackup for its plugin and ease of use? Sound off in the comments and assuage our curiosity! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/ Related posts |
Books, once considered the the pinnacle of human civilization, have slowly gone into retreat. Whether it's technology, modern society or time, the reason behind the demise is widely debated, but what we know for sure is that books today, are still a great way to experience adventure thrills, learn about faraway places and contemplate the future. Whether it's Huckleberry Finn, Fahrenheit 451 or The Universe in a Nutshell, books should find their way back into your daily routine, and that's why we compiled a list of the best book review sites.
On the move, however nerdy it might sound, it’s always practical to have a gaming device at hand. You never know when you’re going to end up in line, stuck in traffic, or locked in an elevator for three days in a row.
There are a lot of people out there looking for work nowadays. With the economy the way it is, people who are out of work are having a hard time 
This is the plain Jane old school format. Still expected by older companies and should not exceed one page. The next up is a variation on the classic resumé and called the Functional resumé seen below:
We all know the importance of maintaining backups and in the past we have covered 
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