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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 1]
- 5 Websites To Check Out The Latest Internet Buzz
- Get Bite-Sized Reviews Of Everything With Blippr
- The 3 Best Desktop Radio Players For Windows, Mac & Linux
- Troubleshoot Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength Problem With HeatMapper
- Find Out How Long Your Transfers Will Take With Transfer Time Calculator
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 1] Posted: 01 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
(1) FollowThatPage - Handy web-based program for monitoring web pages. It keeps an eye on the given webpages and sends alerts when they change. The report will indicate what has been added or removed from the page. Read more: FollowThatPage: Online Program To Monitor Web Pages For Changes (2) CheckMyColours - Online tool for web developers which can be used to check color contrast of websites. It analyzes the foreground and background colors of a website and reports errors and other problems in contrast, brightness and the colors. It also checks if the site provides sufficient contrast when viewed by someone with color deficits. Read more: CheckMyColours: Check Color Contrast Of Your Site (3) Homethinking - Website that lets you compare neighborhoods in several major cities within United States. The site can come in very useful if you're moving to a different city and not sure which neighborhood to choose. Bascially, enter the names of your current city and the one you're planning to move to and get a list of similar neighborhoods. Read more: Homethinking: Compare Neighborhoods in Different Cities (4) Hunch - Personal decision making application that helps people make a decision by asking the relevant questions related to their problem. Enter your query and then, in ten questions or less, it offers a solution to your problem. You can also skip a question if you want to. Hunch's answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community. Read more: Hunch: Online Personal Decision Making Tool (5) WhatsOnMyFood - Web resource where you can find out more about pesticides in your food and their side effects. The site provides you with a searchable database where you can search by product or pesticide name. Each food listing comes with clear information about the number of pesticides used, their types, health effects and toxicity legends. Read more: WhatsOnMyFood: See What Pesticides are Used in Your Food
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
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| 5 Websites To Check Out The Latest Internet Buzz Posted: 01 Jul 2009 02:00 PM PDT
Yet at the same time, we as a public feel the need to fuel these fires by constantly promoting such things. Just like with the buying and selling of stocks, if you mis-time your information, you might have just let the jackpot go. Feel like you’re lagging behind lately in the viral video scene? Feel like everyone’s talking about some new video posted on Youtube that you missed out on? Feel like you’re missing out on the next Susan Boyle? If you feel that you haven’t getting your latest dose of “viral-ness” lately, here are some sites to check out. Buzzfeed
The name says it all. It’s what the web is abuzz about, with a slight twist on things. Buzzfeed, the so-called “viral web in real-time,” incorporates something of a badge system in which people can tag certain issues, whether it be news articles, viral videos, or images and the such with exclamations that capture the essence of the viral issue. Let’s take a look at an example.
These are the top viral issues over a certain period of time, as voted on by people who visit the site. In response to certain posts, users can also follow up with their own “badge” emoticons and tag their comments with other related images or videos. In a sense, it is a forum of weird and interesting things that are currently going on all around the web. Just like any other blog, there’s archives, different categories (ranging from geeky to lol to omfg to cute), and a social network in which you can build a widget and request to link your site to Buzzfeed. Then again, if you’re really lazy (or you don’t know how to read), here’s another one: Viral Video Chart
The concept behind Viral Video Chart is rather simple. Aggregate search or viewing data over a certain period of time and compile which videos garnered the most page views. In short, they count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded, and make lists of the top videos over various periods of time.
So, whether you want to see the top videos of the past year, month, or week, Unruly Media’s Viral Video chart will most definitely satisfy your need of figuring out what exactly everyone is watching. Remember, these sites are for your time wasting viewing pleasure only. If you’re interested in a more consolidated database of what’s hot on the web, check out these sites: popurls.com - Lists the current popular headlines circulating around the internet on one single page. Sites are sorted according to original medium (Youtube, Digg, Yahoo). alltop.com - Updates popular headlines every hour and sorts them based on categories (fashion, technology, gaming). Wikirage.com - Displays which Wikipedia webpages were updated or edited over a certain span of time. Most likely, if the page was edited multiple times within a time period, something’s up! Still not satisfied? Then check out our article on 21 sites to find out what’s hot online. What do you think? Have any better sites than the ones I listed above to get your daily dose of what’s hot online? Shout it 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
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| Get Bite-Sized Reviews Of Everything With Blippr Posted: 01 Jul 2009 12:00 PM PDT
But sometimes, a review doesn’t need to be long-winded or full of adjectives and summaries. All you want to know is this: what is it? Is it worth my time? For such things, check out Blippr. Blippr is essentially reviews in Twitter-style; short reviews of apps (software and Web), books, games, movies, and music in less than 160 characters. Other than the name that doesn’t make any sense, or the crazy noun (”blips”) that’ll never catch on, it’s a great application that will save you loads of time when searching for product reviews. Blippr is quickly becoming a popular destination for people looking to read and write simple, quick reviews on all kinds of products. If I’m going to see a movie, I frankly don’t really care what critics say – they don’t appreciate the wonder that is childish humor. What I want to know is simple: do people like me enjoy this? Twitter’s great at this (and Blippr plays really well with Twitter), but Blippr’s a more robust and more put-together version. You won’t get New York Times-caliber reviews, but most of the time you don’t need them anyway. If all you want to know is “should I check this out?” then Blippr’s got you covered. You can sign in to Blippr with Friendfeed, Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku, Facebook, Google, Yahoo and OpenID. The advantage here is two-fold: you don’t need a new set of credentials, and most of the linked networks allow you to choose to publish your blips every time you review an item. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Blippr’s integration with other services is one of the best parts of the site, and isn’t just limited to the login screen. One of the best, and smartest thing about Blippr is that it integrates with other media-related services. Blippr can add your Netflix movies to your “Stuff,” see what you’re reading on GoodReads, and pull your listening habits in from Last.fm. Once you link these accounts to Blippr, it will automatically create a library for you.
Once you’re logged in and set up, start poking through the site’s categories – movies, books, music, games, and apps. Each of these categories has sections for reviews, “recommended” (based on your reviews, and what similar people are reviewing — something like Last.FM’s artist recommendations), and several other sections that let you look through and add to the database on Blippr. You can search through the site’s coffers to see what people are watching, reading, listening to and playing with. For each item you come across, you’ll see a series of short, 160-or-fewer-character reviews along with the users’ overall opinions of Blippr.
If you bump into something you’ve seen, read, heard or tried; posting a review is easy. You get four options: “I love it!” “I like it,” “I dislike it,” or “I hate it!”. Then, you have 160 characters to explain yourself. This makes the reviews short, easy to read, and easy to sort by people’s opinions – sort of an “out-of-5″ review but with a better set of choices.
The brevity of the reviews is the best part of Blippr – you can figure out what hundreds of people think in the time it would take to read only a few on a site like Amazon or Newegg. Blippr’s like Twitter in that aspect – nothing in-depth, but perfect for figuring out what’s on the tip of everyone’s tongues. If you’re trying to figure out which movie’s perfect for you this Friday, or which album you should buy from the Beastie Boys, Blippr’s a quick and easy way to take the pulse of a product, without tons of leg work on your part.
Every product, book, movie, or whatever has links to buy it and be saved it to “My Stuff”, which will then helps Blippr figure out what you like and tailor recommendations suited to your taste, or look through similar products to the one you’re looking at. It’s a great way to find new products, and to figure out what other people like you are enjoying. The more you add to your “Stuff” and the more items you review, the recommendations will automatically get better and you’ll have a great organizer of all your media on Blippr. Knowing what you’ve seen, what you’ve read, and what else you might like is a great tool. With these integrations, Blippr works even faster to bring you suitable recommendations closer to your choice in movies, books and lots more stuff!
Where do you go to figure out what to read, watch, hear or use? We’d love to know where you get your recommendations and reviews from. Share them with us in the comments — 160 characters or less! Like to shop online? Find out how you can save money with 5 saver shopping sites. Photo: Andrei Z 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
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| The 3 Best Desktop Radio Players For Windows, Mac & Linux Posted: 01 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT
With the list of free players growing all the time (iffy companies are cropping up all over the web like raging teen acne - awful to behold and tough to stamp out) it’s time to narrow your choice down to the best available players. I’ve listed 3 radio players for Windows, Mac and Linux. For PC
This free radio phenomenon is described in detail here. Screamer is simple to use and can handle just about any streaming format.
Best of all, it’s ad free and virtually indetectable (sound aside, of course). Your computer won’t even feel it, and the player window itself is teeny tiny.
By searching the Screamer radio directory, you can build a presets list - this is the collection of stations the app has collected for you. You can search by genre, language, network or region. The selection of genres is very broad and gets quite exotic, from Anime Music to something called ‘Reggaeton’. There’s also a section called ‘Salsa, Bachata, Merengue’ and a category of Nerd Music. Nerd Music! The sheer extent of the radio database is the best thing about Screamer. But if that doesn’t impress you, maybe you’ll be moved by its handy< a href=”http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/record-streaming-audio-with-screamer-radio/”>extra functions. Screamer doubles as a recorder and encoder! Features include:
Lame has an awful name. It’s anything but! This is considered one of the best mp3 encoders at mid to high bitrates. To select the destination folder for your recorded tracks, go to the Screamer Preferences window and select the Recording tab. You can also define file name patterns and buffer sizes here.
In the General Preferences window, you can set Display and Startup options. For example, hide Screamer Startup if it annoys you and make this little player as inconspicuous as possible.
For Windows or Mac
Most famously… it’s mood-searchable!
What you do is define the mood you want on the north-south-east-west compass, which reminds me those political compasses where you answer some questions about your social attitudes and get placed on a spectrum: welfare state proponent vs. free market capitalist (up and down scale) AND socially liberal vs. socially conservative (left and right scale). Musicovery does the same with mood by getting you to place yourself between Dark and Positive, and Energetic and Calm. Once you’ve clicked somewhere on this 2D chart, you must limit yourself to an era and a genre.
This is what you see when you ask for dark, energetic electro! For Mac users: Musicovery has a plugin that lets you listen via iTunes. A simple .dmg download will let you use this incredible popular streamer. For Linux
1. An easy to use browser
The Rhythmbox tab list (on the far left) allows you to view your Play Queue, Library, Podcasts, Radio preferences and Last.fm streams. So, you get a lot more than radio streaming. And people whinge about the poor player options on Linux! 2. Comprehensive audio format support through GStreamer GStreamer is a multimedia framework written in C which allows the programmer to create media-handling components like audio and video playback , recording, streaming and editing. The popular Entertainer media center for Linux (mentioned in this article) uses this technology. It’s tops. 3. Options to transfer music to and from iPod, MTP, and USB Mass Storage music players The iPod tab will appear on the left when you connect your device, just like on iTunes.
4. Direct access to Jamendo
Jamendo is marketed as a ‘new model for artists to promote, publish and get paid for their music’, and Simon previously covered it in his article about the best sites to download music. With Rhythmbox, you get access to the immense range of Jamendo downloads. These are free and legal music downloads shared under Creative Commons licenses. 5. Last.fm streaming Find the Last.fm plugin here and import a lot of the things that made that player great. Build a Last.fm station straight from Rhythmbox!
6. Plugins There is an impressive list of third party plugins available on the Rhythmbox Developer page. You’ll also find desktop art, ripping/recording devices and a plugin called Remuco that lets you control Rhythmbox remotely from your cell phone! Besides Rhythmbox, you can also find a bunch of alternative here, as Damien has listed out. What are you favourite desktop radio players? Do you use an app that wasn’t listed here? Do share them with us 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
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| Troubleshoot Your Wi-Fi Signal Strength Problem With HeatMapper Posted: 01 Jul 2009 08:00 AM PDT
If someone has already asked you this question before, you probably would have drawn a map by hand and just marked the access points, but it is much easier and more accurate to do it with professional software such as Ekahau HeatMapper. Just download, install, run and you'll be up and running in no time ready to map the wifi signal of your area. Even if people don't ask you this question but you have a laptop and move around the workplace a lot, it is always useful to know where you can receive the best wifi coverage, and where you can't. Heatmapper also gives you real-time information about access points. So if you’re a network manager, this will help you troubleshoot access points with a wi-fi signal strength problem and show where improvements can be done for better coverage. If you have Windows XP or 32-bit Windows Vista, just download and install the 52MB executable file on a wifi-compatible laptop and install.
Every time you run HeatMapper, you will be asked whether you want to use a map of the location that you are about to survey or a plain grid. It is recommended that you have a floor plan to get best results. If you are using a grid, make sure that you keep your measuring accurate on the grid to what you actually walk to get best results.
If you don't have a map or floor plan of what you are surveying and you want one, there are numerous sites that you can quickly draw one up. I made a basic floor design of my house using FloorPlanner. It is quite simple to use, but I won't go in to details about how to draw your floor plan. If you want to save your floor plan or edit it later, you can create an account, or just take a screen shot of your floor plan. If you don't know how to take a screen shot, you can read this tutorial then take a look at some screenshot tools that MakeUseOf has written about before. Now, that you're set up to map your wifi signal strength, walk around your house and every time you want to take a survey of the signal strength, left-click on the interface. To get best results, make sure that you walk behind walls and in all corners of the room and click often. Once you are done taking signal samples from around your house, right-click and a map will appear to show you where the best wifi signal is as well as where you may have a wi-fi signal strength problem. Once you right-click, you will see the wireless coverage, and if you move your cursor over an access point, you will be presented with detailed information such as the signal strength, channel and MAC address. Below is the screenshot of the wifi signal in my home. (This is only a basic drawing of my house). As you can see, those green lines represent my path.
Once you are done, you can click the 'Take screenshot' button on HeatMapper to save your map. The only downside to HeatMapper is that you cannot zoom on your map and save your mapping progress. So once you close HeatMapper, you lose your information, so make sure you have enough time to survey the whole area. Visit Ekahau homepage or the HeatMapper page to download. So what do you think? What that a useful app to help you visualize your home’s wifi signal strength? Now do you know why your connection keeps dropping when you’re hiding out in your study? Let us your experiences, 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
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| Find Out How Long Your Transfers Will Take With Transfer Time Calculator Posted: 01 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT
I find myself transferring huge amounts of data to and from my data center over the weekend. I need to transfer files on a schedule because there is no way in hell I am going to be logging onto a computer and manually setting up backups or transfers on my days off. Because bandwidth is a commodity these days, I find myself needing to know how long a transfer will take. This way, I can schedule all of my transfers and not worry about them until I verify them on Monday. I might be a network engineer and I might be the guy who you ask what to do when your computer starts acting strange. However, I do not know how long a transfer is going to take before it starts. I don't know how to figure it out… But now, I don't have to! Enter Transfer Time Calculator. Such a simple application and yet so powerful! This is a 44KB file that is fully portable. You simply download it and then run it.
By filling in the speed of your line and the size of the file, Transfer Time Calculator will do all the math for you and show you how long it will take. Remember, this is an approximation because your line speed or the speed of the line on the other end can fluctuate. With that being said, let's give her a try! I simply filled in the speed of my line by typing in 100 and then selecting Megabit/Sec because my line’s speed is classified as a 100 Mbit/second line. Next, I entered 100 for the file size and then choose Giga Bytes. This will represent a 100GB file being transferred over a 100Mbit line.
Then, I hit the Calculate button near the bottom of the application and…
My results then showed that it would take approximately 2 hours and 37 minutes to transfer this 100GB file over a 100MBit line. The other side of my line is also a 100Mbits/sec private line, so this should be close to accurate if not right on point. If you are going to be using this for calculating your files being uploaded to a website or something like that, your times will be higher that reported. You can figure out your actual upload speed by using a website such as www.dslreports.com/speedtest. We would love to hear what you think about this application and if it helps you with your daily computing activities. Do you use something similar? Maybe you have a simple formula to share with the rest of us? Either way, leave your thoughts in the comments. We won't byte 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
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Viral Videos - they range from quirky, to funny, to just plain outrageous. Most of the time they are utterly useless and provide 15 minutes of fame to whoever produced them.
Where do you go to before you decide whether or not to buy a product? If you are choosing between several similar items, how to make the right decision? Some use 
We make a lot of 
Originally inspired by Apple’s 
Has someone said to you,"Where's the best wireless coverage around here?" And you don't have the time to tell them where all the wireless access points are because there are so many of them. Well, save some time explaining the same thing over and over and hand them a detailed map of your wifi coverage.
It's your favorite friendly neighborhood admin here, dropping another free tool on you to make your life easier.
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