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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 16]
- Create Printable To Do Lists To Get Organized With iDailyDiary
- 6 New Labs Features Introduced For Google Calendar
- Play and Download YouTube Videos On Your Mac with MacTubes
- How To Install The Recovery Console in Windows XP
- DistortIt – Free Photo Morphing Software to Have Fun With Pictures [Windows]
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 16] Posted: 16 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
(1) ManualsOnline – This site contains over 300,000 free downloadable manuals for different product categories including cell phones, cameras, laptops, household appliances and others. You can browse manuals by product type, by brand or search with keywords. Read more: ManualsOnline: Over 300,000 Free Downloadable Manuals (2) NukeoMeter – Simple awareness tool based on the data obtained from The Guardian. It can tell you how many nuclear weapons are within range of any given city. Just enter the city and country name and it will give you a quick overview including the total number of nuclear warheads by country and delivery means. Read more: NukeoMeter: Find Out How Many Nuclear Weapons Are in Range of Your City (3) SupaLogo – Quick online logo maker that enables you to create nice logos in just few clicks. You can easily customize logos in terms of color, outline, size, font and gradient. Just enter your logo text into provided field and use the options to customize the look of your new logo. When ready, download your new logo as a PNG file. Read more: SupaLogo: Quick Logo Maker (4) thisMoment - If you have your photos and videos spread across multiple social sites then thisMoment could be useful for you. Using it, you can easily combine your photos and videos from your other social accounts (Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, etc) into one sharable multimedia canvas, your friends’ public photos and videos can also be included. Read more: thisMoment: Combine Your Photos & Videos from Various Networks (5) Zamabook – Web-based appointment scheduling software which lets individuals and business owners schedule appointments with clients anytime and anywhere. It eliminates the need of phone tag, voice mail and emails to book appointments by putting the complete appointment book online. Read more: Zamabook: Web Based Appointment Scheduling Service
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 Twitter ? Now you can follow MakeUseOf on Twitter too. Related posts
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| Create Printable To Do Lists To Get Organized With iDailyDiary Posted: 16 Jul 2009 02:00 PM PDT
A few months ago, I wrote about one of the organizational tools I use – Yahoo Calendar. Varun also recently wrote about Springpad, a very cool personal organizer. These tools are all great, but one of the most effective ways that I’ve found to keep myself on task every day is to generate printable to do lists to get organized every morning. As the day goes by, I cross each item off the list and then update the system at night? What system, you ask? For years now, I’ve used a nifty application called iDailyDiary. How To Use To-Do Lists To Get OrganizedIt probably isn’t the most “green” method one can use to get organized. I’m sure environmentalists wouldn’t be very happy to know that I print out a to-do list on paper every day. But when it comes to remembering things, there are only so many places you can bring a laptop or a PDA. iDailyDiary is essentially a rich text editor embedded into a calendar scheduling tool. It defaults to a somewhat cheesy notebook background, but I’ve gotten used to it and never bothered changing it.
The interface looks a lot like Wordpad, but as you can see, there are embedded calendars and scheduling features throughout. Every day that you log in, you’ll find today’s date displayed at the top along with the to-do list that you have created for that specific day. iDailyDiary FeaturesThe formatting features aren’t rocket science by any stretch, but they do offer a few cool items that allow you to add a little bit of style and flexibility to your lists, such as inserting links to to-do lists for other pages that may be related to the present task. Maybe you’ve done something similar before, or you need to follow-up on a previous task.
Another simple feature that adds some convenience is the ability to add hyperlinks to resources or informational sites that might help with completing that particular task.
The ability to interlink the various date pages as well as outside web pages has saved me a tremendous amount of time in cases where I’m trying to remember how I did something, or whether or not I eventually followed up on a phonecall or email. Other useful editing features include highlighting, font formatting, and embedding images into your list.
With all of these formatting and editing features, you’ll be able to create to-do lists that extend far beyond your standard list. It certainly expanded my horizons when I graduated from cramming my daily lists into Notepad, up to using such a simple, graphical application to manage my daily projects. The Integrated Calendar SystemThe aspect of this software that makes it the most useful is the fact that it’s built upon a calendar. For every single day, you can have as many tabs as data as you like. I’m a simple guy, and I like having a single tab that I use. However, some people are far more functional and like to separate tasks into categories like “work” or “home.”
You can add a tab quickly by clicking on the “add tab” icon at the top, and then renaming it by right-clicking and selecting “Rename Page Tab.” Also, at the very bottom of the application window, there’s a cool bar display of the monthly calendar.
Navigating through your schedule from one day’s to-do list to the next is as easy as clicking on the date. Keep in mind that while I certainly use the application as a massive collection of daily to-do lists, the name of the application is iDailyDiary – so if you like, instead of organizing your daily entries in the form of a list, you could always simply use it as a personal electronic diary system where you can keep track of tasks accomplished, phone conversations, important email notes and more. Exporting and PrintingSuch an application that is meant to help you organize your life is only as good as the external “things” you can do with it. In this respect, iDailyDiary holds up because you can export your daily logs to a decent list of external formats.
Save your lists as a rich text file, unicode, HTML or even HTML with CSS. This means you could export your entries to your website or blog if you so desire. And of course, the feature that I use every single day is the ability to print out your to-do lists. Clicking on the Printer icon allows you to quickly print out your list exactly how you’ve formatted it in the daily window.
It works especially nice if you have a color printer that can display the images and different colors of highlighting. In any case, it certainly beats my old school plain to-do lists of the past. Some day, I might even consider loading my iDailyDiary to-do list HTML files over to my mobile device… and go paperless *gasp*! Maybe… Some day. Do you live your life strictly by a daily to-do list? Do you have any cool applications or online tools that you use to keep track of them? Share your own resources with the MakeUseOf community in the comments section below! Don’t forget to check out other to-do apps we’ve written about before here on MakeUseOf: Image credit: jessica mullen 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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| 6 New Labs Features Introduced For Google Calendar Posted: 16 Jul 2009 12:00 PM PDT
The labs feature is a great way to push forth features which may be useful for a group of people, while others could do without it. Taking the labs philosophy further, Google Calendar now has a Labs feature as well. As usual, you can access the Labs features via Settings (and then the Labs tab) and you would have to explicitly enable/disable the features according to your liking. Presently there are 6 features available inside Google Calendar Labs and I will elaborate each and every one of them after the jump.
It is nice to see that Labs has been included in Google Calendar. It offers customization and an outlet for newer, more interesting features to make it to the main application (like Tasks, which recently became a part of the main Gmail Application). One can certainly expect more interesting features in the future. I am already in love with “Attach Docs” and “Next Meeting”. Which ones do you like the most? What would you like to see in Labs next? Tell us in comments, we would love to know. 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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| Play and Download YouTube Videos On Your Mac with MacTubes Posted: 16 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT
Choosing the best YouTube video downloader among that crowd could be troublesome. But for Mac, there’s one name that keeps popping out as the preferable choice: MacTubes. The iTunes for YouTubeThis app often dubbed as the iTunes for YouTube because the interface gives you the familiar look of – well, you’ve guessed it: iTunes.
The search results will be shown on the main pane of the window with small thumbnails for a quick glance. Hover your mouse over any item and a description box will pop out. If you click and choose one of them, the thumbnail will appear on the small box on the bottom left corner. Click the Play button at the bottom of the main window and the play window – which look very similar with YouTube’s – will appear as if you were playing a video file from your hard drive.
You may get a warning window telling you that the video can not be played from the embedded URL as some YouTube videos are set to be played only from the site. MacTubes then will suggest you to open the video using your web browser.
There is another pane at the left of the main window. You can add and remove folders, playlists, searches and feeds here. Arranging and re-arranging the position of each item can be done easily by dragging and dropping. MacTubes also allows you to add videos from the main pane to one of the the playlist or folder. Downloading the VideosWhen you find videos that you like, it’s possible to download them just by right-clicking on the items on the list and choose Download from the pop-up menu.
The cool thing is that you can download the videos as FLV, MP4 or HD. While the size of HD video makes it a no-no for people with slow connection, the preferable format for many would be MP4 as iTunes and iPod can play this format with no problems. The download window is similar to Safari’s and will show you a list of downloaded videos and their progress. Very convenient if you ask me.
I don’t consider myself a YouTube person but after fiddling with this app for a while I think I would convert to one. Have you tried MacTubes? Do you have other preferable alternatives? Share them using the comment below. 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
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| How To Install The Recovery Console in Windows XP Posted: 16 Jul 2009 08:00 AM PDT
The Recovery Console is a special command-line interface for Windows XP which allows an administrator to identify and locate drivers and files which are problematic, as well as troubleshoot system settings. It's recommended by Microsoft only for advanced users (in other words, that nerdy kid down the block), and only when Safe Mode (pressing the F8 key at boot-up) is not working. To install the Recovery Console, you will need your Windows XP CD. The version of Windows XP on the CD must match or surpass the version installed on your PC, thus a Service Pack 3 disk is recommended. If you don't have one, try to borrow one from a friend or co-worker. If you can't find one, you can download setup disks or disk images from Microsoft.
To install the Recovery Console, follow these steps (lifted from this Knowledge Base article):
The black screen with white text can be intimidating, but if you've ever played with the command line, you should feel right at home here. If you need help, just type "help", and optionally, the name of the command you're curious about, like "help fixmbr". I'll run down the highlights of what commands you'll most likely use: "Bootcfg" recovers the Boot.ini file. "Chkdsk /r" looks for bad disk sectors and attempts to recover any information which can be read from them. "Copy" copies a file to a target location. "Delete" deletes one file. "Disable" disables a Windows system service or driver. "Enable" restarts a disabled service or driver. "Diskpart" manages hard disk partitions. Be very careful using this! "Expand" decompresses a compressed file. This is good for getting files off the installation CD if needed. "Fixmbr" repairs the boot code on a hard-disk. If your operating system "cannot be found" you'll likely use this command, along with little brother "Fixboot". The Recovery Console is scary but helpful, and you'll be glad that you've installed it on your hard disk before Windows gives you any trouble. If you have any system recovery tips, please leave comments below. Image credit: Paul Boxley 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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| DistortIt – Free Photo Morphing Software to Have Fun With Pictures [Windows] Posted: 16 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT
The program is super small and does not require you to install anything. In other words, it’s a portable app! I downloaded it and ran it. In about 2 minutes, I already had the program open in front of me and it looked like this.
Next up, I hit the right mouse button for my menu and checked out my choices. I then hit Load (Control + L) and picked a picture of myself. Who better to make fun of then myself, right?
Here is the image I picked. As you can see the picture is much bigger than what is on the screen by the sliders. But the app had no problems working with the portion I had on display.
I quickly moved the sliders around and hit Morph and then I started dragging my mouse around and I pulled on my nose. Oops, look at what I did!
This was fun but let’s undo it by hitting Undo and see what else I can mess around with.
You can keep them and have them displayed on the right like so:
Save them with your right-click menu and then upload them to your favorite file sharing site – then don't forget to post the links in the comments! I can't wait to see what you come up with! Also, don’t forget to check out other image editors we’ve previously covered, like these 10 free image editing programs for your PC. 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
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Different people have different techniques to get organized. I think a lot of it has to do with your psychology. Maybe you’re a more graphical type who likes graphs and charts that display your projects’ progress over time. Or maybe, like me, you work best with lists where you can complete tasks and get the satisfaction of drawing a big black “done” line across it.
We know you like Gmail Labs, we covered several topics in the past including its 
Windows XP is an odd beast. Some have no problems using it, while others report little else but problems. If you often find yourself in the latter category, you may at some point have the need to use Windows XP's Recovery Console, especially if your PC will no longer boot.
I had some time to kill today and so I went looking for easy and free 
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