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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 26]
- How To Solve Any Windows Problem with Event ID
- Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Stock Photographs
- 3 Forum Search Engines to Search 40.000+ Message Boards
- How To Adjust The Brightness On Your Mac Screen Beyond Default Levels
- You Actually Can Earn Money by Taking Online Surveys
- How to safely dual-boot Windows & Linux with Wubi Installer
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 26] Posted: 26 Jul 2009 03:01 PM PDT
(1) Distorted Tunes Test – Simple online test which provides you with a quick online way to test your pitch perception, in other words it lets you find out if you are tone-deaf. Read more: Distorted Tunes Test: Test Your Pitch
(2) FreeAppAlert – Cool website for iPhone users. It monitors iPhone App Store for paid iPhone apps that just became free and sends you alerts. All you have to do is select how you want to be notified (email, Twitter or RSS) and then subscribe. Read more: FreeAppAlert: Get Paid iPhone Apps For Free (3) Qtorrents – Multiple torrent searcher that lets you search number of popular torrent sites (Isohunt, Torrentsdownload.net, Mininova.org, Tracker.anirena.com, Btjunkie.org and several others) at once. It presents results in categories such as movies, music, tv shows, games, apps and anime. Read more: Qtorrents: Search Multiple Torrent Sites (4) PCitYourself - If you are planning to build your own computer for the first time, make sure to check PCitYourself.com. It provides you with a step by step animated guide to PC building. The guide is nicely organized and presented in 3 main sections: Choosing, Building and Installing. Read more: PCitYourself: Animated Guide To PC Building (5) PhotoSnack – New online picture slideshow maker that lets you create professional looking picture sideshows in no time. All you have to do is upload images, customize them using provided templates and then share with others by embedding of forwarding a link. Read more: PhotoSnack: Cool Picture Slideshow Maker 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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| How To Solve Any Windows Problem with Event ID Posted: 26 Jul 2009 01:01 PM PDT
Windows glitches, errors and crashes are a pain in the rear. More often a reboot (or a smack on the sides) is a quick fix. It gets the work done but it still leaves the puzzler out there – why did the system crash in the first place? To remove the vulnerability (we know that Window's has tons of them!) and troubleshoot errors, it's necessary to diagnose and cure. This is where the Event Viewer makes a worthy entrance. An event, as described by Microsoft, is any significant happening in a system or in a program that should be brought to a user's attention. It can be a system crash, an application freeze or the ominous 'Blue Screen of Death'. The notification is duly logged by the system in a log (the event logs) which we can see using the Event Viewer. The Event Log Service registers application, security, and system related events in Event Viewer. Thus we can pinpoint the exact source of a problem and diagnose to prevent future errors. The Event Viewer has been a part of the Windows OS since the early days of Windows NT. In Windows Vista, it has been modernized to Windows Event Log. In Windows XP, the Event Viewer can be found under Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Event Viewer. That's where we are now headed for some familiarization.
The Three Logs
Windows XP logs events basically in three logs – Application Log, Security Log and System Log. Additional logs may be created by other applications like anti-virus and Internet Explorer.
How to Read the Event Viewer
Using the Event ID to Target and Solve
The Event ID numeric value is a key identifier for the problem. The web is a good place to do some DIY troubleshooting. EventID is a rich database of logged events. The site has a repository of 10,496 event IDs and 497 event sources with a lot more info provided by contributors. Enter the Event ID number and the Source and the site's search engine filters out the possible resolutions for the particular event. Most of the solutions are contributed by users from their experience. Non members can search using basic search. Paid subscribers get better features like an advanced search and searching for event IDs from a specific source. Some other search features available for all users are –
Getting all your answers through the website or with a general web search might not ultimately solve the problem. But it will give you a better grasp of things before you call in the boffins. Using Event ID is just one way. Previously we looked at a few other diagnostic ways to vault over ‘run of the mill stuff’ like stalled Windows. Here's a small troubleshooter's list – 7 Common Reasons Why Windows Can Get Unresponsive Image Credit: Sonietta46 Related posts
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| Top 5 Free Websites for Quality Stock Photographs Posted: 26 Jul 2009 12:01 PM PDT
However, the downside is that all those photos are going to cost you. It’s important to understand the term “royalty-free” (RF) for those websites. RF images are not in the public domain, nor are they free to use without purchasing a license. Luckily, there are plenty of websites for stock photos that won’t require you to dig into your pockets. Here’s 5 of them. FreerangeOnce you register for a free membership at Freerange, thousands of high-resolution stock photos will be at your fingertips at no cost. All of the website’s images can be used for personal or commercial projects.
For photographers, Freerange also offers Google AdSense revenue sharing when you contribute. Check out this list for more of the top websites to sell your stock photos.
StockvaultWith over 13,000 free stock photos, Stockvault connects designers and photographers. The photo sharing website offers all of its images for absolutely free personal or non-commercial use.
Check out more about Stockvault in MakeUseOf’s Directory. FreeDigitalPhotosFreeDigitalPhotos neatly organizes its thousands of photos into easy-to-find categories and sub-categories. Every image is available for free download but if you want a larger version or a high-resolution version, they’re priced at $5 and $10, respectively.
stock.xchngSXC.hu has over 400,000 photos to choose from by more than 30,000 photographers. The website maintains that all images are free, but you must abide by its image license agreement.
Some of the site’s artists may also need to be notified about using some images, and in most cases, you’ll need to give credit to them. FlickrIf you still haven’t found what you’re looking for, you may want to actually try Flickr. The popular image hosting website has millions of images from its users who have offered their work under a Creative Commons (CC) License. All you have to do is simply pay close attention to the type of licenses each image falls under to use it appropriately.
Keep in mind that Flickr photos offered under the CC Attribution License requires you to give credit to the photographer. Want more? MakeUseOf’s Directory of Apps has got details on MorgueFile, yet another website database for free high-resolution digital stock photos. If you’re still having trouble looking, try out PicFindr, a stock photography search engine. If you know of any other good sites, let us know 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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| 3 Forum Search Engines to Search 40.000+ Message Boards Posted: 26 Jul 2009 11:01 AM PDT
The search engines below are really great at finding some of those useful forum posts. Some of them are even more relevant than Google in displaying results (for those that don’t know you can search probably over 90% of forums via Google by adding the inurl:forum operator.) All of these engines can search by post date, post number and other factors. Google can’t (currently). Without further ado, let’s start. I have listed them by the value I think they provide. The best is at the top, the worst at the bottom.
Omgili
What is it about? : You probably know you can search forums by the post title. Let’s take a look at Omgili’s advanced search page. What’s interesting there is you can choose to search for discussions in 35 languages, sort by date when the topic is created and also sort by minimum number of replies or unique users that posted on that topic. Very interesting. Some great free services offered by Omgili are: - Google@Omgili: it returns Google results. Next to each result, you have one number which displays how many times that result is mentioned on different forum topics. You can also view those topics. This is very useful if, for example, you want to see what people say about a specific website or company. - Omgili Q&A: I honestly haven’t found a better Q&A search engine than this which returns more relevant results. The bad thing is that Yahoo Answers is not included there (maybe they did this for a reason.) but overall it is very valuable web application. Boardreader
What is it about? : Same basic functionality like Omgili. Difference in returning relevant results – Boardreader includes Yahoo Answers in its results. This makes them sometimes have a better relevance than Omgili in displaying some results. You can enter a site in their engine and it will display the forums linking to that site which is good if you’re a webmaster. The thing I don’t like about Boardreader is that they try to be all in one – video search, microblogs search, they even search images! Not cool. I wonder what would have happened with Google if at the beginning (with a still undeveloped general search engine) they started spreading themselves around like this. Boardreader should focus more on developing their forum search engines than add some (pretty basic) other types of engines on their site. BoardTracker
What is it about? : The guys at BoardTracker are typical old school marketers. When you come on their site you’ll see messages that remind me of: ‘We have the latest technology!!!’, ‘New! New! New!’, ‘Our product is THE BEST!’ Is it? I guess it was either me or their site is at times very slow (not to talk about their NEW! BoardTracker version 2.0 that’s a pain in the…you know what). I’ve decided to include them in this list only for their excellent relevant results. They did their job as expected. Overall, the 3 search engines above are pretty good in doing their job. Omgili is the best by far. They offer the biggest database and most relevant results. Boardreader includes many sources in its results and BoardTracker…well…it does its job as required and I believe they can do way more. Forums are still not dead and they are very useful so I hope these sites will come very useful to you. Can you recommend a better forum search engine? If so, please do tell us about it. 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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| How To Adjust The Brightness On Your Mac Screen Beyond Default Levels Posted: 26 Jul 2009 09:01 AM PDT
A few minutes in front of the screen later, he began to notice that his monitor-lit face was the “brightest” thing in the room. His eyes also started to feel sore and watery. He tried to dim the display, but it was already at the lowest brightness level possible. One more scale down would be total darkness. What should he do? While the romantic cafe setting would not match everybody’s story, I’m sure that there are other places (dorm room, parking lot, backyard) and situations (deadline, world peace, Facebook status update) that forces someone to continue working with his computer in the dark environment. If you’ve been in those situations, you’ll know that the solution is to adjust the screen brightness between Apple’s default lowest scale and the blank black state. Here are three alternative applications to adjust the brightness on Mac.
This app hasn’t been updated since 2006 but works fine under Leopard.
The developer’s site provides three kinds of installer: PowerPC, Intel, and Universal Binary. Just like Brightness Control, Shades is also unfriendly to colour calibration software, and should not be used if colour accuracy is critical.
Shades allows users to activate “Hot Keys” to control its functions using keyboard combinations. The one hot key that should be remembered is the emergency brightness restore: Alt + Esc.
Actually, this app is only substituting the brightness button on the keyboard and does not really help in the “near dark” issue. But since it’s pretty useful and also related to controlling One of the ideas is to help users free the function keys that were used for brightness control. For those who use functions keys a lot – like Photoshop users – this ability would really comes in handy. Have you been in a situation where you need a near-dark screen to work? Do you know other software alternatives to adjust brightness on Mac laptop? Please share using the comments 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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| You Actually Can Earn Money by Taking Online Surveys Posted: 26 Jul 2009 07:01 AM PDT
But not everyone’s got the feel for it. There are of course other ways. Taking on company offers, or filling out surveys. That’s right, you can get paid for giving your opinion. Before I began to work at MakeUseOf, I worked this possibility for a time. A 16 year old boy, in Belgium, gathering some extra cash. This only begins to show how ‘open’ this all is. Your age and nationality matter little to none, the only thing you need is an internet connection and some time to spare. Today I’d like to show you how to tackle this line of ‘work’. The various tips and tricks involving successfully engaging it, and the trustworthy places to go for your survey fix.
Step One – Get Real
Do not expect to make money in truckloads. You (most probably) won’t get hundreds of dollars a week, thousands a month, whatever the ads try to tell you. True, when you participate in a multitude of high-roll surveys daily you can make a fair amount, but things don’t work out like that in real life. Those high-roll surveys will be a sporadic surprise, rather than routine, and depending on how many company aims you hit or miss (do you handle the budget at home, or do you live off your parents? Are you a jock or a nerd?), the amount of surveys you receive can differ greatly. Also, when considering the hourly earnings – some surveys can take up a lot of time – you’re not exactly well-paid. However, if you enlist for a reasonable number of survey services, you can certainly score some extra bucks. Best of all, you don’t need to be able to actually do things, just have an opinion – and everyone has one of those. Just keep in mind that this is a little extra money, instead of your new job. Step Two – Get ReadyYou want to be properly set up before you go. Besides cluttering your address with surveys, you’ll encounter some false – spamming – services if you go venturing on your own. I highly suggest registering a new email address for the job, to keep pleasure and business apart, so to speak. Go with Gmail (a lightweight and easy interface is advised in days to come, it’ll also be needed to set up our filters) and pick an easy to remember name. FiltersIf you keep the different suppliers separated, it’ll be easier to see where the occasional crap is coming from. Don’t worry, you won’t need to register twenty-odd different addresses, Gmail helps us with that.
If you ever receive spam on one of your pseudo-addresses, you can easily put a halt to all incoming traffic. Just edit the right filter, and select Delete it. Step Three – Get Paid
Below you’ll find three of the highest recommended sites, by us and other satisfied users over the internet. All are international. 1. SurveySavvyIf you’re going for the bucks, you definitely need to enlist for SurveySavvy. Each survey gets assigned a dollar value, between 2 and 20 dollars. Even when you don’t fit any of that month’s surveys, you get automatically entered in the monthly sweepstakes, where they give away fifty 10 dollar prizes. 2. American Consumer OpinionDon’t be misguided by the name, they work worldwide. They pay between 4 and 25 dollars per survey, and also automatically enlist you for their monthly sweepstakes. Don’t pass on any surveys you receive. 3. Harris PollsOne of the most respected survey sites out there – both by users and professionally. They award you relatively generous with Hlpoints, which you can redeem for gift cards, prizes, and sweepstakes. They work internationally and "are continuously investigating international laws regarding sweepstakes rules and eligibility". More information on their questions page. 4+ Other SitesYou’ll want to enlist for as many survey suppliers as possible. Check out Online Paid Surveys for other websites. You can filter them on geographic availability and get more information out of the reviews. This is where we round up this article. I hope you’ve learned something and will be able to put it to use. If you’ve got any other questions or comments, head straight to the comments section below. http://www.surveysavvy.com/ 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 safely dual-boot Windows & Linux with Wubi Installer Posted: 26 Jul 2009 05:01 AM PDT
Today I'll show you how to install Linux (specifically Ubuntu Linux) alongside Windows XP or Vista in what's known as a "dual-boot" configuration. There will be no hard-drive partitioning (that's scary!), instead Ubuntu will be installed in this case as if it were any other Windows program. This also makes it easy to uninstall later, in case you don’t like it. Why would someone want to do this? Maybe you're just beginning to really learn it, like I am. Maybe you're a gamer who is just not a fan of the Windows interface and would like an alternative. Maybe you're the power-user type and just wants to see what the fuss is about. Any reason you may have is valid. I'm just a big fan of free software who wants to help spread the word. To get started, there's no need to go to the Ubuntu site and download or order a CD-ROM. In this example, all you will need is to download and run the Wubi installer. Wubi started as an independent project, but is now officially supported by the Ubuntu community as a method of installation.
Depending on the speed of your Internet connection, this next part may take a while. Wubi will download an image of the Ubuntu installation CD. As long as you're on a broadband connection, this shouldn't take more than an hour or two; Feel free to ignore the approximate download time at the onset.
After a few more installation screens, you'll be prompted to reboot your system. Doing so should bring you to a new screen, giving you a choice whether you want to boot into Windows or Ubuntu. Select Ubuntu anytime to finish the installation.
Don't panic when you see the formatting-partitions screen; Only the virtual disk file on which Ubuntu sits is being formatted.
After another reboot, enter your username and password and gaze upon a fresh pristine Linux desktop. It takes a little bit of getting-used-to, but the learning curve isn't that steep. Feel free to glance over the documentation to get your feet wet, check out our many articles on Linux use, and join the forums if you have any questions. Don't be afraid of asking something “stupid”. We were all n00bs once. Well, except me. I'm still a Linux n00b. But hey that's what I'm taking out student loans for. My choice of Ubuntu may have upset some Linux fans. Feel free to let me have it, and tell us why your favorite distribution is better, 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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To paraphrase from the ditty 'Don't Quit' – When things go wrong as they sometimes will; don't quit. Because for every Windows crash there's a way to lick the problem without dialing assistance.
Stock photography is all over the place on the Web. If you’re looking for an image of just about anything, you’re bound to find that professional, high-quality photo from various online distributors and agencies, like Getty Images, Corbis, iStockphoto, or Shutterstock.
I have always found something special about finding information on forums. On most forums, the information you can find there is REALLY useful, almost always within reason.
There he was, alone in a “near-dark” romantic cafe. His girlfriend has just called and said that she would be “a little bit” late. He understood too well what “a little bit” meant for her. So, armed with his MacBook, he tried to make use of the waiting time by being productive.
Just slide the scale to the left to decrease the brightness of your display. The app says that if you want to restore the original brightness, you can click on the “Restore” button or hit the Escape key. But I found out that even though this action brightens the screen, the color combination is distorted a little bit. Closing the app will restore everything back to normal.
screen brightness, I included it here.
Earning money out of your home, online. Many people play with the idea, and some even go after it. There are various ways to pursue it. One is to write, like I do, for websites or blogs. If you’ve got it in you, I recommend you to do it. We’ve written in the past about websites to earn money writing, 
Before you start, there are a few things you’ll need to realize.
The final and most simple step. Register on a multitude of (trustworthy) survey suppliers, and wait for the ‘work’ to come. You’ll quickly notice that different sites work different ways, with different systems and paygrades. Usually you’ll need to wait until you’ve reached a certain amount (ten to twenty dollars) until you can cash out – sometimes a wiring to your bank account, most often Paypal.
At my school, my class and I are comparing different operating systems. Each of the big three (Windows, Mac, Linux) have their pros and cons, but I'm certainly not here to incite a flame war. About half of my class was just introduced to Linux last week when using some Knoppix disks. Linux is very popular as a server operating system, and most fans of it would tell you that it's very close to being ready for Joe User's desktop PC.
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