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Cool Websites and Tools [July 9]
How To Get On YouTube At School Using Mobile Internet
Easy GUI Management of Grub and Usplash Settings with Startup Manager [Linux]
4 Fun And Simple Things You Can Do Using Terminal [Mac]
Download Torrent Files Hassle-Free with BTaccel + Free Invites!

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT

Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) Folowen - If you are looking for an easy way to follow someone on all their online social activities, then Folowen can help you. It is a social profile search engine that aggregates the social media profiles of a person from 20 different social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc and presents the results on one single page. Read more: Folowen: Quick Social Profile Search

(2) Graphing Calculator – This online calculator lets you quickly and easily create complex graphs for those weird sine, cos, tan equations. You can also drag points on the graph, locate specific coordinates and zoom in if you need to take a better look. It's certainly a useful tool for school and college students. Read more: Graphing Calculator: Create Complex Graphs Online

(3) MadRingtones – Web service that enables you to make ringtones from YouTube videos and MP3 files. Creating ringtones is quick and easy – simply navigate to the site, enter the URL of the video or MP3 file and click 'Load'. Once file is uploaded, you will be able to determine the tone's start/end points and then download it to your computer as MP3, .amr, .ogg or .m4r files. Read more: MadRingtones: Make Ringtones From YouTube Videos & MP3

(4) MyNoteit – Online note organizer developed especially for school and college students. It offers many features which can help to keep track of notes and assignments. Students can upload files, manage tasks with a to-do list, make use of the built-in advanced calendar and create and join various class groups. Read more: MyNoteit: Online Note Organizer For Students

(5) ViewLike.us - Lets you quickly test website in different resolutions. You simply need to enter website URL into provided field and click on the "Submit" button. Once the page loads, you can click different resolution tabs to view how the site looks. Read more: ViewLike.us: Test Website In Different Resolutions

Submit Your Web App

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.

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How To Get On YouTube At School Using Mobile Internet

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 02:00 PM PDT

So you’re a YouTube addict, and you find it difficult to make it through an entire day without browsing through the latest videos at YouTube. You’re desperately trying to find out how to get on YouTube at school. Now, you could certainly attempt to bypass your school’s firewall using an application like FreeProxy, but as many readers noted at that article – it’s also a very good way to get suspended from school (or fired from work).

Instead of attempting to circumvent the school’s computer system to access YouTube, you could always make use of that cool little Windows Mobile device you were able to convince your parents to buy you for your last birthday. No matter where you are – sitting on the bleachers at the football game, riding the bus, or sitting way in the back of the class during an exceptionally dull lecture – just enable your wireless Internet connection and start watching hilarious YouTube videos on your phone!

How to Get on YouTube at School with Your Mobile Device

If you have a mobile device that’s installed with Windows Mobile, and you’re lucky enough to have a decent mobile Internet plan, there are a number of methods you can use to post YouTube videos, such as this MUO review of Cellspin – an app you can use to post to eBay, Facebook and YouTube. However, YouTube itself now offers the ability to both play videos and broadcast your own videos from your mobile phone. This feature now allows anyone to instantly stream realtime videos directly to YouTube.

No more waiting until you get home so you can load it onto your computer and upload it to the website. With this feature, you can instantly post witness accounts of a natural disaster or government atrocities no matter where you are or where the nearest computer is. If there’s a cellular provider with a mobile Internet plan, this YouTube feature turns you into a walking online witness through which the whole world can see the sort of things that you see every day. Start telling your story through video images streamed directly up to YouTube from your phone.

Whether you choose to “play” or “create” on YouTube from your mobile phone is up to you, but both features offer very cool opportunities. Now you can watch videos while you’re sitting and waiting for your name to be called at the restaurant. Capture a video of a crime in progress (don’t get too close) and feature it at your YouTube account before even the local media has any clue what’s going on.

How to Play YouTube Videos On Your Mobile Phone

Playing YouTube videos on your mobile phone is easy. All you have to do is open up your mobile web browser and visit “http://www.youtube.com.” If you visit from a mobile device, you are automatically redirected to the mobile version of the site. This mobile version of YouTube will work whether you have Windows Mobile of just an Internet-enabled cellphone.

You can search through videos or browse the front page of the newest ones. Watching videos from the mobile version of the website includes two technical requirements that you need to be aware of. Your mobile device needs to support RTSP streaming, and your cellular carrier needs to allow streaming video on your device. Now, if it doesn’t work on your mobile device, don’t despair. As you can see, there’s an option to download the YouTube application to your mobile device. If you do have a Windows Mobile device, then you’ll want to consider clicking on that “download application” link, as the mobile application version of YouTube is much more functional (and better looking).

Within the YouTube mobile application, most of the videos play clearly and with very little skipping – especially if you’re connected onto a Wi-Fi network.

If you’re only on the cellular data line, you may need to give the videos some time to download to your device before you click the play button.

Uploading Your Mobile Videos Directly to YouTube

Now, uploading the videos you recorded with your device is almost as easy as downloading videos to watch. All you need to do is sign up for your own YouTube account (you can connect it with your Google account). Once you do, YouTube will provide you with your own mobile email address ending in “m.youtube.com” where you can send your videos to get instantly published under your YouTube account.

Setting this up takes just a matter of minutes. Then, turn on the video capture feature of your mobile device, send the video file to your mobile YouTube email account, and you’ve just instantly posted your own mobile email to the Internet without the need for a computer. Now that’s sweet. To test it out, I took a 17 second, blurry video of my skinny cat who was lounging in bed. In less than 5 minutes of emailing the video from my phone to my mobile YouTube email account, the fuzzy video of the silly little critter was up live on YouTube!

All I’d have to do is increase the resolution of my video capture and I could become the next online Oliver Stone! Just imagine the “compromising” situations that you could capture your friends in at school – and then publish it on YouTube instantly for the world to see! Now, no corner of the world is safe from the snooping video-camera eyes of the mobile phone crowd. Be afraid… be very, very afraid.

Have you ever used any other tools to instantly post video from your mobile device to the Internet? Share your own tips in the comments section below.

Not using a Windows Mobile device? Grant shows you how to stream live video from almost any cellphone or you could check Qik out.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Easy GUI Management of Grub and Usplash Settings with Startup Manager [Linux]

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 12:00 PM PDT

Ever wanted to change the Grub bootloader entries? Wanted to hide some, move some to top and make defaults? People must have suggested to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst. Oh and don’t forget to back it up if you make a mess of it. There are all these different options you can add to the defoptions line to make it look the way you want. Sounds like too much to handle? How about a GUI tool to make all this a breeze and still have lots more to offer?

StartUp Manager can be used to achieve this easily. You can install StartUp Manager by using your distribution’s package manager. Or check here. Once installed, it can be found under System > Administration > StartUp Manager.

StartUp Manager can be used to easily customize a number of options that would otherwise require you to get your hands dirty by editing configuration files. As a start, you can change boot options such as the selection timeout and default operating system. If you have multiple operating systems, a useful option here is to make the Last Used operating system as the default choice, which would automatically boot the one you used the last time. Such a setting can be quite handy when you have a clear favorite in terms of operating systems and others are just installed for completeness.

You can also change the display resolution and the color depth if you are experiencing any problems with the display of the main menu. Uncheck “Show bootloader menu” if you don’t want to see the menu, and boot the default operating system each time. “Show bootsplash” can be used to add an image as background to the bootloader menu. We did a complete tutorial on it some time back. “Show text during boot” provides you with textual feedback of what is currently happening in the boot process.

The appearance tab allows you to customize the look of the bootloader menu as well as the Usplash theme. You can add colors to the bootloader menu, pick and choose the ones you like. A Usplash theme governs the progress bar display during the boot process. You can find some Usplash themes here, click on “Manage Usplash themes” and add the one you downloaded, then select the one you like and next time you boot, it would be there to greet you.

That is not all by any stretch of imagination. StartUp Manager allows you to do pretty advanced stuff. You can password-protect the bootloader or only recovery mode entries (a good choice) or the boot options by simply placing a check against the option and specifying the password.

If you are bothered by how cluttered the bootloader gets after a kernel upgrade, you can limit the number of entries from here in. Uncheck “Create boot option for recovery mode” to remove the recovery mode altogether if you are paranoid about someone getting into your system through recovery mode root prompt.

StartUp Manager is a no fuss tool which greatly simplifies tweaking and customizing of bootloader options and helps you manage Grub and Usplash settings easily without having to go in and tinker with the configuration files yourself. What do you think of it? Let us know in the comments.

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4 Fun And Simple Things You Can Do Using Terminal [Mac]

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT

Terminal is one of the utilities that is commonly found on UNIX-based computer such as Linux and Mac OS. It is where users can type commands asking the computer to perform certain tasks. Something like a DOS environment in Windows. Kinda geeky, isn’t it?

That’s why everyday computer users tend to avoid Terminal. People say that tinkering with the Terminal is not for the faint hearted. Because something could – and possibly would – go wrong.

But actually, there are fun things that we can do using the Terminal’s command line. Here are few of the simple ones.

1. Play the Old (Classics) Games

Mac OS X comes with GNU Emacs, part of GNU operating system, which can be accessed via Terminal. There are some old, classic games hidden there. They are far from beautiful if you compare them with all the graphically-intense ones that we have today. But to fill in some spare times, these ‘uglies’ will do just fine.

To access them, type in (or better yet, copy and paste) this command into the Terminal to access the GNU Emacs:

emacs

Click Enter, then continue with the key combination of “Esc + x”. Type in one of these game’s names to start playing:

5×5
blackbox
dunnet
gomoku
hanoi
landmark
mpuz
pong
snake
solitaire
tetris

I know some of them well (the last four on the list) while other names did not exist in my dictionary until just now. I tried to play them all but without any information or how-to’s, it’s a tough effort to carry out.

If you want to quit the game, use the key combination “Ctrl + x” followed by “Ctrl + c”

2. Watch the text-based episode of StarWars IV

I used to think that George Lucas skipped his early Math classes since he started the Star Wars sagas with number IV. Yet, I’m always a big fan of Luke and Leia.

If you feel like being nostalgic (and have plenty of free time to spare), why don’t you connect to the net, open the terminal and type in:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

That’s how far a REAL fan will go. (And if you are lucky enough to have IPv6, you’ll get more scenes and – drum roll, please – color!)

3. Talking Terminal

Still have so much time to spare but no one to spare the time with? You could have the terminal talking to keep you company.

Just type in:

say {Fill in your text here}

Fill in any text in the area provided above and Terminal will speak it out for you.

4. Meet the Doctor

After going as far as letting the talking Terminal accompany you during your lonely hours, you feel worried about your mental health and thinking about going to a mental therapist.

Well, look no further. Emacs also hides a virtual psychologist. To consult it with your problems, follow the above steps on number 1, but instead of typing in the name of the game, you type “doctor” (sans quote).

I guarantee that you would need a real psychotherapist after consulting with this one.

As a final note, I think I should mention that I tried these fun things on my Mac. But since everything described here is merely command lines, these commands should also work fine on Linux machines.

Do you know any other fun but simple things that you can do with the Terminal? Or can you help with some of the unknown games above? Share your knowledge using the comments section below.

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/

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Download Torrent Files Hassle-Free with BTaccel + Free Invites!

Posted: 09 Jul 2009 08:00 AM PDT

I'm a big fan of the BitTorrent protocol despite its bad rap. Devised as a method to distribute large files without using up too much bandwidth, it's become a hit for all the right and wrong reasons. It's unfortunate that using BitTorrent can be so difficult: Tracker? Seeding? Port forwarding? Why did my ISP block my download, even though the files were legal?

BTaccel, a browser-based and remotely hosted BitTorrent client, can help to make things far easier. Feed it a link to a torrent and it does all of the P2P wizardry automatically, downloads the file and prepares it for you to grab off their servers via HTTP.

In order to use it to download torrent files, you’ll need to sign up with an invitation. Lucky for you, I’ve managed to get 150 free invites just for MakeUseOf readers! You may get it at the end of this article but continue reading to find out what BTaccel can do.

First, the user interface is Google-simple. You have an account link at the top, and a box in the center where you enter a URL or keyword. You can search by keyword, browse a website by proxy or paste in a direct link to a .torrent file.

Browsing torrent tracker sites via the proxy is a bit hit-and-miss in this alpha release. Sometimes, it will pick up a clicked torrent link, but not always. Your best bet is to browse the tracker in a separate window, copy the torrent link's location and paste it into BTaccel.

After you’ve chosen a torrent, the next screen you see will be a summary of the torrent's contents. Once the download from the swarm is complete, you can be alerted by email, and then you may download torrent files individually, or download a single compressed ZIP of all the files packed together.

To view the torrents currently in your download queue, hit the Home page and you’ll be presented with a list of your torrents and their progress.

What makes BTaccel so great is the fact that your system won't be bogged-down with uploading and downloading. Once the torrent is finished, you'll have a direct download from BTaccel's servers (which must be completed within 72 hours). Another advantage is the fact that you can start a torrent from any computer with a browser and then finish the transfer at home, when it's convenient.

In comparison to using a traditional BitTorrent client, BTaccel offers users an advantage on ease-of-use. For those interested in the protocol, we have plenty of BT-related material on MUO, especially The Big Book of BitTorrent, which I consider a must-read. How do you like your BitTorrent? Let us know in the comments.

We've got your hookup for the first 150 users to sign up with alpha invite code "100GBmakeuseof150". If you've missed out, follow @btaccel on Twitter for a chance to score a code.

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