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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 18]
- Track Your Reading and Catalogue Your Books with BookTomb [Windows]
- 8 Tips To Effectively Boost Your Wireless Router Signal
- Publish Your Own Book For Free With Some Help From PublishAmerica
- 10 More Cool Things You Can Do With YouTube Videos
- 4 Top Sites to Get Event Tickets Instead of TicketMaster
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 18] Posted: 18 Jul 2009 04:00 PM PDT
(1) FastFoodMaps – Online map of fast food joints in US that lets you find the nearest fast food restaurants in any unfamiliar area. The site lists over 50,000 fast food restaurants including McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, KFC, Carl's Jr, Hardee's and In-N-Out. Read more: FastFoodMaps: Online Map Of Fast Food Joints (2) CityMove – Reverse-auction moving marketplace that provides you with an easy way to find movers and get the best deal. You simply post your move job by listing all of the stuff you want moved and let movers compete for it by bidding. Read more: CityMove: List Your Move Job & Let Movers Compete For It (3) Odadeo – Social network for fathers who wants to learn how to be a better dad. It allows fathers to make pledges about things that will make them good parents, keep a record of these promises and get DASDAQ graph of their performance. Read more: Odadeo: Learn How To Be A Better Dad (4) VerifiedPages – Website which lists official websites and online accounts of brands and acts as a trusted source where people can look to find out if a site or online account really is associated with a brand. Read more: VerifiedPages: Protect Your Brand On the Web (5) WhatsTheCost – Provides free financial calculators, which let you calculate the "true" long-term costs of financial products such as loans, mortgages, credit cards etc., and costly habits such drinking and smoking. Reduce your debt faster by calculating how much you could save by overpaying on a mortgage, which debts to pay down first and more. Read more: WhatsTheCost: Free Financial Calculators
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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| Track Your Reading and Catalogue Your Books with BookTomb [Windows] Posted: 18 Jul 2009 02:00 PM PDT
Since reading that, I have been addicted to reading and have amassed a huge collection of literary titles and some crap, unfortunately. I have so many books, I never know what I kept and what I tossed. So when someone asks me if they may borrow the book I was talking about last week, my answer would be, “Yeah, if you can come and find it!” Now, I stumbled upon this small portable application called BookTomb and it not only stores all your book loving data – it also has the ability to retrieve book covers, ISBN numbers, descriptions and a bunch more from Amazon, ISBNdb and BookThing. So entering your collection into should be a snap! Let's see how easy it is to use BookTomb. On first launch you will see this:
Next thing you should do if you want the Amazon search to work, go to Tools. Then you will see this screen:
I changed the Amazon Access Method to “via bookTome” and I choose Amazon at the bottom for “Default description service provider”. Now you are ready to enter some books! Click on Authors or any other link on the left so that you can see the Add New Book menu option again – then hit it.
I just filled in the Title and Author. I choose Stephen King's The Cell that I read a while back. Then, I hit the Import from Amazon button at the bottom and it brought me to this page:
I selected my book, which was the second choice and I checked the boxes next to all of the fields. If you don't want all the information simply leave the box next to that field unchecked. Then hit the Import book button on the bottom right.
Now all the fields you chose will show up when you highlight or open your book. You can hit View all books to see everything you have added to your database. Some of the other features I like about this program include the ability to mark a book as read, search by author or title, add books to your wish list and even track your reading. The program keeps a history of everything you modify in a book from when you added it. So if you added a book as soon as you bought it and a week later you mark it as read, all of that is recorded. You can see this by selecting a book and then choosing history like so:
This is an awesome portable application for any book aficionado! Do you have another way to catalogue your book collection? Have you search our directory? We have a lot of interesting posts regarding books and reading. If you can’t decide on which book to read next, let Stefan help you out by showing you the 8 best book review sites. Related posts
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| 8 Tips To Effectively Boost Your Wireless Router Signal Posted: 18 Jul 2009 12:00 PM PDT
These routers have the power to transmit intangible signals; these signals, powerful as they may be, are prone to constant interference whether it be by physical objects, other signals floating around in the air, or even because you didn’t plug the wire in all the way. Regardless of what the issue, there are some proven ways to try to remedy the situation of a weak Wifi signal. Some may simply be a little bit of common sense, other methods require purchasing additional parts. Here are 8 tips on how to boost your wireless router signal. Position it betterUnless you are living in a cave and you somehow miraculously have internet connectivity at the same time, you probably figured out that if your wireless router was in the corner of your kitchen under a pile of old newspapers and your computer was located on the second floor on the opposite side of the house — it is a great idea to place your router in an open position (preferably in the center of your house) where it isn’t obstructed by dense or metallic objects such as file cabinets or brick walls. Other items that may interfere with your signal include (but are not limited to) microwave ovens, cordless phones, garage door openers, and even baby monitors. The bottom line is that the less objects in the signal’s way, the easier it is for it to relay information to your computer. Change the WiFi ChannelGenerally, Wifi routers transmit their signals on a radio frequency of 2.4 GHz. Many other household objects may operate on or around the same frequency, like cordless phones, for example. So, the channel becomes bogged down over time with lots of excess traffic that slows down your wireless connection. In the U.S., routers have a predefined set of 11 channels, and the default on a lot of them is channel 6. Changing the channel would reduce some interference. So how do you change the channel? A great utility many people use is called NetStumbler, a wireless networking tool that just so happens to offer the option for you to change your wifi channel. Once opened, the program gives the choice of fooling around with all of your wireless utilities. Here is where you change your channel:
Which leads to:
Since the default for most people (at least in the United States) is 6, you may want to change your channel to something like say, channel 11. Take note that the changing of your wireless channel will NOT in any way increase your speed or bandwith. It will simply remedy your network connection if it keeps breaking off or getting lost. Update firmware or driversUpdates, whether related to the router firmware or your computer’s network adapter are done to fix bugs, smoothen out performance and reliability, and maybe even add new features. It is always a good idea to stay up to date with the latest releases by either of these parties. Tim suggested using RadarSync to easily automatically update your computer’s drivers at once. Buy your equipment from the same companyCompatibility can be a big problem, especially for two way transmissions. It may help to purchase your adapter and your router – everything, from the same company. Aside from that, some companies have embedded enhancements that improve speed or signal strength when everything is under the same brand. Replace your antennaMost routers come equipped with something called an omnidirectional antenna. This means that the antenna attached to the router broadcasts the signal equally within a certain circular radius. This is great if the router is positioned in the center of a hub where it needs to be able to reach ever corner of a room, but it can prove to be extremely wasteful if your router is in the corner (then again, why would it be there in the first place?). Since the signal is transmitted in a radius, if you place it in a corner, a lot of the transmitted signal is sent into the wall or outside into the open. That is why you can manually detach your antenna and replace it with a high gain antenna. This focuses its energy to direct the signal in one general direction. Simple enough? You may have to check and see if your router has an external antenna jack/removable antenna. Replace your wireless adapterSince this is a two-way transmission, it may not have occured to you that it may not be the router that is the problem, but actually the wireless adapter attached to your computer. If your computer cannot send signals back to the router, the same problem ensues. What is an adapter? It used to be the card that you inserted into your computer or laptop. These days, most of the adapters are in the form of USB devices. Consider switching to a USB adapter that houses an external antenna, like this one depicted below.
This is usually only applicable to desktop computers. If you purchased a laptop that has a built-in adapter, it probably isn’t your adapter because they are usually very high quality installations. Add an additional Wireless Access Point (WAP) or RepeaterIf all else fails, you may need to purchase a repeater or a secondary Wireless Access Point. The consensus among these two options is rather mixed. Constructing a secondary WAP requires the ability to feed an ethernet cable from your primary router to the new access point. There are also cost considerations to be aware of, as WAPs cost more than regular wireless routers. Even so, WAPs have certain flexibilities that normal routers do not have. They can be configured as gateways, bridges, clients or repeaters. But that’s another story. The bottom line is that the WAP is an extension of the original hub in order to extend the distance of the signal. The repeater works the same way. Here is a tutorial on how to set up the WAP courtesy of Techskillsvideos: Try weird thingsApparently aluminum foil amplifies reception and transmission. It may or may not work, YMMV. A little bit of background: You may have seen 802.11b or 802.11g written somewhere on your router – these are merely wireless LAN standards that the particular router adheres to. The main difference between these is that 802.11b has a maximum data transfer rate of 11 Mbps, whereas 802.11g has a much higher 54 Mbps rate. With that being said, there is no way to improve data transmission or bandwith outside of hardware applications and upgrades. The tips mentioned above are meant to help you solve the problem of an interfered or weak signal. These may or may not work for you, but there is a strong correlation between troubleshooting and success rate. Have you any other tips to help strengthen a weak signal? Has changing channels made a big difference for you? Tried attaching aluminum foil to your router’s antenna? How did that turn out for you? Share 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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| Publish Your Own Book For Free With Some Help From PublishAmerica Posted: 18 Jul 2009 10:00 AM PDT
“Wow, self published, eh? That’s got to be expensive. I looked into it a while back.” “No, not really. I found a publishing house that published it for free, and just takes a portion of the sales.” “Really? That’s awesome! Who does that?” “PublishAmerica.com. Here’s my card with the address on it.” So I bought the book. It was awesome! Best pirate book I’ve read since Treasure Island. Okay, it’s the only pirate book I’ve read since Treasure Island, but I still recommend it. I walked away with dreams of publishing that one book that someone said resides in all of us. PublishAmerica, you must be too good to be true. How can it be possible to publish your own book for free? But then I went to the site. Here’s what I found…
You write your book. You e-mail or mail it in to PublishAmerica. They review it for quality and grammar and see if it will garner some sort of market. If that’s all good, they’ll talk to you about a contract. You sign the contract. They design a cover for the book. They market the book on their website and to different booksellers such as Barnes and Noble, Ingram, Borders.com and others. They also give you some advice on promoting the book yourself. Your book sells and they send you royalty payments. No, really, that’s it! All of that and more for free, while you retain complete control over their intellectual property and rights to it, for say, movie deals or what have you. “But Guy, I can get my book vanity published or hire an agent to take care of that? Isn’t that easier?” you ask with smugness dripping from your disdainful face. Well, vanity publishing costs a lot of money and unless you are a superstar marketer with a genuine bestseller on your hands, your odds of recouping what you paid to self-publish are pretty slim indeed. You have to take care of getting your own ISBN, or copyrighting the book as well as the cover design and art work. Or you can pay the vanity publisher more to do that for you. If you choose the literary agent route, then you’re looking at trying to find an agent who will take on an unknown author, and will actually work hard to get you published. Then they take a slice of what you make on the book, on top of everyone else traditionally involved in publishing taking their slice. That might work out if you sell 4 million books, yet the odds are slim on that as well. “Okay, Guy,” you inquire with some trepidation and eagerness, “so what’s the downside?” Well, I don’t know exactly what the percentage is for royalties. They also do not accept manuscripts from outside Canada or the United States of America. Oh, and they don’t accept books in the genres of coffee table books, screenplays/scripts/movies, theses, text-books, gift books, or books of quotes. While they don’t publish every manuscript that comes to them, they do take more risks than other traditional publishing houses. They have published over 40,000 authors since 1996. Some of those authors have gone on to make writing their career, have movie deals and receive some pretty significant critical praise. Really, in the years that I’ve spent trying to find a way to publish that great Canadian novel I have in my desk drawer, this is by far the simplest and least expensive route that I have found. Have you self-published a book? Do you know of any other publishing houses like PublishAmerica? I’d love to read about it in the comments. Put your literary skills to good use and leave us a note. Don’t think your writing is good enough? Then check out 7 Online Resources To Help Improve Your Writing. 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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| 10 More Cool Things You Can Do With YouTube Videos Posted: 18 Jul 2009 08:30 AM PDT
However, with its extremely large user base and plenty of tools at your disposal, few may argue that YouTube is the place for your videos to be. Some time back we showed you some YouTube URL tricks that allow you to change how the player behaves. Right now, allow us to present forth some of the most popular tools out there to go along with YouTube and the super cool stuff you can do with them. Rip Audio
If you are only interested in the audio of a particular YouTube video and want to rip it off quickly, you can do so using ListenToYouTube. Paste in the URL of the YouTube video that you want the audio extracted, allow it to do its thing and then download the audio as a MP3 file. Mac users may find that iExtractMP3 performs the same function. Create Ringtones
If ListenToYouTube allows you to grab the audio, MadRingtones allows you to play with audio. It enables you to make ringtones from YouTube videos or MP3 files from your computer. Creating ringtones is quick and easy: simply navigate to the site, enter the URL of the video or MP3 file and click 'Load'. Listen through, and it lets you specify the tone's start/end points and then download it to your computer as MP3, AMR, OGG or M4R file. Splice and Chop!
There are times when you only like a certain part of a video. You could use the “#t” URL trick to skip to the interesting part. However, if it is more than just viewing the interesting part of the video that you are trying to accomplish, you should check out TubeChop or Splicd. Both these sites allow you to specify a YouTube video URL, the part you want to keep and cut the rest off. You can then embed the “chopped” video on your blog/website or share it with your friends. Remix or Dub videos
Want to add an MJ track to your dancing kid video? YtDub is a cool video dubbing app which lets you easily dub any YouTube video with audio from another video. Works easy, simply enter YouTube IDs of the video you want to dub and the video you want to use as the background track, hit ‘Dubbo’ and you will get a link to your newly dubbed masterpiece. Play it, share it or do whatever you like. Dump the default interfaceSearching and then clicking to view a video is all fine and dandy, but there is always room for a little change. Bored of the Youtube interface? Then check out:
Use the cutting edge features
TestTube is like Labs for YouTube. It is a place where you can test drive the latest from YouTube developers. At the time of writing, TestTube includes – CaptionTube – to add captions, Video Annotations, Active Sharing – to show other people what you are watching, Streams – to chat with others who are watching the same video, Warp – a tool to visually browse videos and a demo of the HTML5 Video Tag. There are new ideas added (and taken down) from time to time. Find sites that have embedded your videosYouTube provides you excellent tools to track statistics pertaining to your videos. Here, we explained how you can use the tools to track which sites are embedding your videos. Set a video alarm
A simple online alarm clock that wakes you up with a YouTube video of your choice. Set the alarm time in simple English (tomorrow at 7am, in 45 minutes) and pick any YouTube video you want. No-registration required. Add Subtitles to YouTube VideosEver wanted to add subtitles to Youtube videos and share them with friends? Subyo is a web service that can help you with that. Before anything else, you’ll need to register and get yourself a Subyo account. Next, copy and paste a YouTube video URL into the provided field and click on "Add Subtitles". Then video will load in the Subyo editor where you can start adding subtitles. Watch flagged videos without logging in
There are lots of videos on YouTube marked as inappropriate by users. Due to this, YouTube restricts viewing of these videos to registered users only. If you do not have an account (or you don’t want to add a video to your history) and want to view a flagged YouTube video, check out NSFWYouTube. BE WARNED: Due to its niche (if I may call it so) the site has explicit NSFW content, discretion adviced! Turn Youtube links to videosUse the Videoembed Greasemonkey script that reads links to video sites on any website and embeds the corresponding video right next to the link so you don’t have click it or visit Youtube to watch the video. It works for a number of other video sites as well. Get rid of distractions
QuieTube is a cool browser bookmarklet which allows you to view any YouTube video all by itself on a page, removing the surrounding bells and whistles (somewhat like the “Turn down lights” in Youtube). Just drag & drop the provided bookmarklet to your browser toolbar/bookmark bar and click it when viewing a YouTube Video. Add text, graphics and links to videos
KickLight is a tool that lets you add text, graphics and links to your YouTube video without obscuring it any way. The application inserts a space just below a video and then lets you add your content (text, images and links) there. It also allows you to customize how and when added content should be shown. Download VideosThere are scores of tools, tricks out there that let you download videos from Youtube. From Firefox extensions, to greasemonkey scripts to complete applications to specific sites — when it comes to downloading, there are probably more than what is required. We covered the best, have a look. Come Again?Did I hear you murmur a name we missed? Well go on, use the comments to flame us! Tell us about it. If you have used any of the tools we’ve listed, do share your experiences. 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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| 4 Top Sites to Get Event Tickets Instead of TicketMaster Posted: 18 Jul 2009 06:00 AM PDT
For anyone who has struggled through trying to get tickets for a popular show, it becomes apparent very quickly that the odds are stacked against you. You may be under the illusion that if you sit online, or on the phone, with Ticketmaster the very moment that tickets go on sale, that you have an equal and fair chance of getting tickets as everyone else. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case. That’s why I’ve listed 4 sites to serve as alternatives if you’re desperately looking for that concert ticket which is unavailable anywhere else! How to Get Tickets Despite the Ticketmaster MonopolyThe truth is, the event ticket market is stacked higher against you than a Vegas casino. A venue that accomodates 20,000 wild fans can sell out in about the time it takes for you to log into your computer. While Ticketmaster has the appearance of fairness in that ticket sales start at exactly a certain time (usually on Saturday), sales take place through so many outlets that available seats can disappear in minutes. To make matters worse, while you may think that the moment the clock strikes 9 a.m. on Saturday that you have a chance to get the best seat, think again. Before the tickets even go on sale, entire batches are claimed by the artist’s own organization, corporate sponsors, season pass holders and others. At least 20% of available seats are already gone by the time the doors open for sales. Even worse, professional “scalpers” who have contacts within organizations such as the National Associate of Ticket Brokers, are somehow able to grab up the best seats in the house long before you ever pick up the phone to make that call. However, never fear – just because Ticketmaster says that all seats are sold, you still have options. We’ve already covered a few cool applications like Roosterfly, which lets you compare event ticket prices, or FanSnap, an app that lets you search for available event tickets. However, I wanted to review 4 of the best websites to get awesome seats at popular, hard-to-get-into shows. TicketCity – If You Can’t Beat Em, Join EmBecause of the fact that so many groups and organizations have access to the best seats before you do and you really want to get good seats for the show (especially after Ticketmaster has sold out), your best bet is to track down and purchase tickets on the secondary market — since that’s really where all the best seats are. It’s a dog-eat-dog market even involving corruption and bribery, in some cases. Brokers (essentially scalpers) use inside connections to garnish huge blocks of tickets for sale on the secondary market. Case in point is TicketCity. Randy Cohen, CEO of TicketCity, told BNET in an interview:
TicketCity covers just about any sort of event you’d probably be interested in including sports, theatre and concerts. There’s even a large button to click if you’re interested in selling your own tickets to TicketCity! There are also ticket specials in select locations and a 200% money-back guarantee. This is obviously one of the “big dogs” of ticket brokerages. RazorGator – For Hard-to-Get TicketsAnother major broker of event tickets is the very popular site RazorGator. It even touts itself as the place to go when you’re dying to get popular tickets and can’t find them anywhere else. How does RazorGator get these rare tickets? Wouldn’t you like to know?
RazorGator is a pretty cool site, and it covers more event types compared to many other sites. Where else could you get tickets for a rodeo, Cirque du Soleil, and a Nickelback concert all in one place? You get a 100% money-back guarantee and there’s even another section of the site called “Fan2Fan Exchange” where fans can either exchange or sell tickets. Sort of like a third market for ticket sales. Fox World Travel Tickets – Travel & Tickets Go Hand in HandFox World Travel is a travel agency based out of Wisconsin that eventually realized that a large majority of what their clients wanted to do when traveling included obtaining tickets for shows, games or other events. The agency entered the world of ticket brockerage at their site, where you can find tickets for just about any kind of show.
This is only one example, there are lots of other travel sites out there that offer access to tickets, so make sure to hunt them down. In fact, ask a local travel agent in your area - they likely have access to blocks of popular even tickets as well. TicketsToGo – Small Can Be a Good ThingWere you ever in a situation where you were dating a girl you really wanted to impress, and she said something along the lines of, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go see the Lion King on Broadway but they’re sold out for months!” Now, how cool would it be to have a buddy who you could call on your cellphone and say, “Hey, dude… could you hook me up with a couple of tickets to the Lion King?” Well, at TicketsToGo, you’ve got that dude to call.
At TicketsToGo, you place an order for a show and even if it’s officially sold out, this independent broker will access a “a large network of professional suppliers” to locate an available ticket for you. You’re surely going to pay a lot more for it – but at this point, when you’re dying to see the your favorite band or singer, and completely bummed out that there aren’t any seats left, does it really matter, if it means you can get in the door? Definitely use TicketsToGo as the last option, but at least it’s an option that you have. Have you ever had any success getting hard-to-get tickets? What resources do you use? Share your insight in 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/ Related posts
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