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- Cool Websites and Tools [July 27]
- Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks
- How to Color Correct RGB Images Quickly & Easily Using Photoshop
- The 5 Best Free RSS Icon Sets For Your Website
- Audio File Formats Explained in Simple Terms
- Learn Interesting Geographical Facts About Mars On Google
- Check Out Hilarious Stand Up Comedy Routines And Jokes With The Laugh Button
- A Beginner’s FTP Command Tutorial For Ascii or Binary File Transfers
| Cool Websites and Tools [July 27] Posted: 27 Jul 2009 06:01 PM PDT
(1) CoffeeSeekr – Useful service for coffee junkies and travelers which helps to locate coffee shops anywhere in US. You just need to enter an address or a postcode and in return it will present nearest Dunkin' Donuts, Peet's Coffee & Tea and Starbucks coffee locations. Read more: CoffeeSeekr: Find Nearest Dunkin Donuts & Starbucks Coffee Locations
(2) ConferenceCalendar – Website which helps you track conferences around a world. It tracks conferences across various segments like business, technology, internet marketing, electronics etc and provides you with elaborate details about the conference, its venue, location, accommodation details and contact information. Read more: ConferenceCalendar: Track Conferences Around the World (3) FavouritePlaces – Brand new service from Google. It features a Google Map with favorite places chosen by celebrities and local experts from cities around the world. You can either browse places by celebrity name and view where he/she likes to go, or explore map by cities and view places picked by local experts. Read more: FavouritePlaces: Maps favorite places of celebreties & local experts (4) LyricRat - This is a twitter integrated lyric search site that lets you find songs names. Send a tweet to @LyricRat followed by the lyrics and you'll receive a reply stating the name of the song along with the artist. Great way to find lyrics on the go, especially to those Twiterholics. Read more: LyricRat: Twitter Integrated Lyric Search Site (5) TimeZoneCheck – Local time map which lets you instantly check current local time in different geographical time zones. You can view local time in popular world destinations or hover with your mouse over a geographic area on a map to view the corresponding local time in that time zone. Read more: TimeZoneCheck: Local Time Map Of The World 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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| Geeky Fun: Latest Hilarious Picks Posted: 27 Jul 2009 06:01 PM PDT Check out the top picks from MakeUseOf Geeky Fun during the last week.
If you would like to keep up with all latest Geeky Fun additions, please subscribe to the Geeky Fun feed here. You can also subscribe and get the latest additions via email. 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 Color Correct RGB Images Quickly & Easily Using Photoshop Posted: 27 Jul 2009 03:01 PM PDT
There are 2 major, accepted color scales out there for consumption by human eyes – additive color and subtractive color. Subtractive color is accomplished via some sort of dyeing, screening or printing method. This is achieved by mixing either custom ink colors, or adopting a color scale , which in the subtractive realm of color, is called CMYK. This refers to the 4 base colors used to physically, in paint or dye form, mix together to allow the formation of any color in the Cyan Magenta Yellow Black scale. This is what’s knows as CMYK – but i’m not sure why K stands for black though.
Additive color is the realm of discussion in this article. Additive color refers to the scale of color produced by adding different colors of light (rather than ink) to produce an image or color shade. In additive color, when you add the 3 primary colors together, Red Green and Blue (RGB), you get pure white, as illustrated in the additive color wheel above. Whereas if you mix together Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black inks, you get a dull brown. Since RGB is the primary color scale for all monitors, phones, screens, laptops, anything that produces light; we will be discussing this today, as a way to empower you to be able to have brilliant images on your websites, and to get the most out of the pictures you snap in with your camera in any condition. We begin with a picture of a clearing on the ocean. The following picture looks dull, discolored and too red. But you’d be surprised how much color information is contained in the picture, that simply needs to be brought out.
Open the image in Photoshop and you can follow along as you read the article. The tool we will be using can be found in the Image menu under Adjustments, and it’s called Levels. Otherwise it can be Hotkeyed at Ctrl-L.
The levels panel is one of the most used panels in Photoshop. You will also find Auto Levels. It is not recommended to use Auto Levels because it simply cannot replace the eye, and most importantly the taste of the viewer. Once you have the levels panel open, there is a simple way to tell if all of the available color information is being used. The following is the levels output from the original image of the clearing on the water, showing a red discrepancy where all of the available color frequencies aren’t being utilized to their potential:
In order to correct this, and the inherent lack of color and brightness in the image, we need to give each respective primary color its own attention. Using the Channel picker at the top we first choose the Red channel. Next, pull the right, white slider over to the left where the dots begin to appear on the graph, indicating the channels are being used. Next pull the left, black slider over to the right to the point where the channel begins to show usage. Do this for red, green, and blue respectively. As you make these changes, make sure the Preview checkbox is ticked so you can see your changes in action. Here’s what the process looks like, after gradually fixing red, green and blue:
Notice that even when we only fix the red channel, the picture already gets slightly brighter and richer. By bringing these sliders in, we are essentially telling Photoshop to spread the available color information over a wider range of color frequencies, and thus fill out the full spectrum more richly. Next we move on to the green channel.
At this juncture shown above, the picture starts to become richer and more saturated with color. After finally adjusting the blue channel below, we can see the picture is at a very rich stage. Details that weren’t previously visible shine out now. What used to be shadows in the bushes are now more bushes, more leaves, more detail. And you would have never known the image contains all this information if you didn’t open the Levels panel.
Using these steps, you can take any RGB image and really pull the most out of the information that’s there. Not all the detail in a picture is immediately visible to the naked eye. But with the Photoshop Levels tool you can maximize on detail and quality for each image. 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 5 Best Free RSS Icon Sets For Your Website Posted: 27 Jul 2009 01:01 PM PDT
But, don’t worry – in this article, we’ll take a look at a few good RSS icons where you can find the right style to fit your site. The ordinary plain RSS iconWe can start with the original RSS web icons by looking at the current set that is considered standard in most web In addition to these two sets, a developer package is also available consisting of many different formats and sizes from 12×12 up to 128×128. The icons are available to download here and can be used for most purposes except for in logos, favicons and “non-open syndication formats”.
RSS icons with a bit of a twistAnother great set of RSS icons comes from 0at with a set of 15 free icons. The icons come in many The download comes in a zip file and includes icons in high-quality JPEG and ZIP formats. The icons are free, but if you enjoy them, you’re encouraged to send a cup of coffee when you download them here. A RSS cup of coffee
Although it only contains eight icons total, they are pretty neat and include things like RSS billboards, coffee and even a man sitting on a bench reading an RSS newspaper. While they are free to use on any project, the author does request a backlink if they are used. The icons come in ico, png and mac format in sizes from 16×16 and up to 512×512. For a download and more information, see here. Glossy color RSS icons
The next set comes from the Snap2Objects site and is a glossy version of the standard RSS icon in many, many different colors. Red, blue, green, black, grey and 25 other colors are available for download. A great thing about this set is that all of the icons are in vector format as well, so you can resize the icons to your pleasure. The icons are licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 format with attribution required. Download the set from Snap2Objects here. And finally… Last but not least is the Feedicons RSS icon set from Zeusbox Studio. This set is a little bit more widely-scoped and The entire set includes almost seventy icons and are in PNG and mac-friendly formats. The set is available to download here and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license with no derivative works. Do you have your own favourite site where you get your RSS icons from? Share the icon love and let us know in the comments 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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| Audio File Formats Explained in Simple Terms Posted: 27 Jul 2009 11:01 AM PDT
It seems as though there is an unending list of file formats that accomplish the same task – saving a bunch of data. What is the purpose of the existence of these seperate formats, and why do they extend the list of available formats to “Save As…“? Is there any real difference between which extension a particular file is saved as, as long as it’s appropriate for the media being saved? Why, why, why do they plague me with their endless resistance to conversion? The list of questions could go on, pretty much for the length of this article, but I believe I should provide some answers, since the questions are probably what led you here in the first place. So here goes nothing – a guide to the inner workings of the common, but still unusual file formats.
Technical Jargon:
Codec: a program/algorithm that encodes/decodes data to convert a file between different formats. The popular media codecs are generally for shrinking file size. Laurence did a post on codecs last year. Lossy Codec: refers to a codec that sacrifices file quality for the sake of compression. Lossless Codec: does not destroy any data, regardless of whether or not the data is necessary for the file’s integrity. Metadata: information about the file that is stored within the file itself – for example, when a picture was taken and what type of camera it was taken with, or the artist of an audio track. Karl has done a post on how to remove metadata from photos. Container: a file format that concerns itself more with how data is stored, and not necessarily coded. Bitrate: the number of bits processed per second. To put things into perspective, mp3’s generally have a bitrate of 128 kbit/s, while CD’s generally have bitrates of around 1.4 Mbit/s. VBR/CBR: the difference between variable bitrate and constant bit rate is just that – VBR uses a higher bitrate to encode (and thus, allocates more space to) more complex parts of the audio file. Audio File Formats Explained
.aiff /.wav.aiff /.wav – These are both uncompressed, lossless formats, which means it takes about 10MB to save a minute’s worth of music. aiff was developed for Apple’s OSX, and wav for PCs, although both formats are compatible with both operating systems. Since wav is the native file format for store bought audio CD’s, it is also the format preferred by PC wielding audiophiles; mac users generally rip CD’s into the aiff file format. There are codecs like FLAC and WavPack that will compress .aiff and .wav files, although the resulting file will still be huge compared to the ubiquitous mp3 format. Simple Help has a great tutorial about playing .flac files in iTunes here; it is for Mac OSX users only. .aac.aac – Apple’s default audio format, AAC is a lossy compression scheme that was developed to replace mp3, but never achieved the prominence that mp3 has with listeners. Some argue that AAC produces the same quality audio at 96 kbits/s as a mp3 does at 128 kbit/s, but with the recent developments in mp3 codecs (particularly LAME), mp3s have performed far better in listening tests against AAC than in previous years. Nevertheless, when it comes to a sound quality to file size ratio, AAC beats MP3. .ogg.ogg – Vorbis, which is the name of Ogg’s audio format, is an open source lossy compression format that is favored by developers of free software for its patent-free nature. Despite its claims of being able to produce better sounding music at smaller file sizes, Vorbis is not widely used because of its slow encoding time and the lack of native support from popular music players such as iTunes and Winamp. However, many video game makers and programmers have begun using Vorbis because it is open source, and thus does not demand licensing fees like mp3 and aac do. If you are interested in testing the sound quality of Vorbis yourself, try the aoTuV modification of Vorbis and install the XiphQT plugin for iTunes. Conclusion : If you’re willing to sacrifice the storage space, and have ears sensitive enough to tell the difference between a CD and a ripped track, go with .wav or .aiff. Otherwise, .aac and .mp3 encoded at bitrates above 256 kbit/s are indistinguishable from CDs for the average person. Vorbis performs the best at low bitrates around 64 kbit/s, whereas the LAME encoder for MP3 performs better at higher bitrates. Regarding VBR and CBR, the general rule of thumb is that VBR will produce better sound quality at a lower file size than CBR can. Ultimately, it is up to your own ear to determine which codec to use, and which format is best for you. Perhaps you’d like to perform your own listening test, to determine how picky your ear is. If so, try WinABX, which is a program that performs double blind listening tests. When you finally decide which format and bitrate is optimal for you, get yourself a codec pack, and convert your music with the multitude of audio converters that are out there. Not to ignite a flame war, but which format/codec/bitrate do you use? Do you think AAC or Vorbis will ever gain the type of popularity that MP3 has right now? Leave your opinion in the comments, and stay tuned for Part 2: Video! 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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| Learn Interesting Geographical Facts About Mars On Google Posted: 27 Jul 2009 09:01 AM PDT
Then, when Google integrated Google Earth features into their online mapping tools, I knew it was only a matter of time before things got really interesting. Today, I’d like to review yet another very cool Google offering known as Google Mars. Observe & Learn Interesting Geographical Facts About MarsI’m very much a visual person. You can tell me all about the characteristics of the Red Planet – the diameter, gravity, and atmosphere – but the cold, hard facts are the ones you can view yourself on Google Mars. These include things like the structure of the terrain, elevations, and the locations of mountains, craters, dunes and canyons. For an interplanetary effectionato – this is some pretty cool stuff.
While most people could pretty much guess where images from Google Earth came from – I mean there are more than enough satellites circling the Earth to take photos – it’s not quite as obvious how Google could get high resolution images of the Red Planet. The foundation of Google Mars comes from the work of Percival Lowell, who mapped out the planet through his telescope in 1895. Working up these principles, Google Mars is the product of collaboration between Arizona State University and NASA researchers. The source for the images (or at least the data from which they were created) comes from the Mars Global Survey or spacecraft for the altitude and photographic imagery, and from the thermal imaging system of the Mars Odyssey spacecraft. The infrared view gives you a crisp, clear view of the landscape through the dust clouds. However, my favorite view to gather elevational facts about Mars is the impressive color-coded elevation map.
When you click “elevation” in the upper left corner, you’re treated to a precise display of the topography of the Mars landscape. Using this feature, you can find some impressively large and deep craters. Google Mars Infrared Lets You Peak Through The CloudsIf that’s not impressive enough, next up is the infrared imaging feature that lets you peek through the dust clouds at the surface of Red Planet like you’re Superman flying over it with X-Ray vision. To display the ability of this feature, the image below is of a section of Mars using the straight “Visible” view.
Now, take a look at this same view under the “Infrared” spectrum and watch how all of the dust clouds completely disappear.
The clarity under infrared is enough to take your breath away. Zoom in a bit and you won’t even believe your eyes - as the craters, canyons and mountains reach up at you just like the peaks of the highest mountains on Earth captured your imagination on Google Earth. The resolution of the orbiting photographs become apparent when you try to zoom in just a bit too far.
The image above is a close-up of the crater at the very peak of a tall mountain. As you can see there’s some slight pixelation, but considering the amount of zoom that’s applied, even the clarity of this photo is impressive. It feels like you’re floating down to the planet with a parachute and in merely a few hundred feet you’ll touch down – ignoring the fact that your bodily fluids would vaporize and you would pass out in seconds. Explore Mountains, Canyons, Craters & MoreFinally, one of the last features of Google Mars (at least on this online version), you can click on any of the known major landmarks – including various volcanos and major or minor craters, and you’ll be swept to the location immediately.
It’s like having your own Google tour guide right on the web. Now, while all of this is pretty awesome, these are only the features available on the web version. If you download Google Earth, you also get a narrated tour of Mars, a “Live From Mars” layer where you can view the latest NASA images, or view 360-degree panoramas shot on the ground by the Mars rovers. Short of donning a space suit and applying to become a NASA astronaut – it doesn’t get much better than this. Have you ever tried Google Earth or Google Mars? Share your opinion of the application and features in the comments section 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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| Check Out Hilarious Stand Up Comedy Routines And Jokes With The Laugh Button Posted: 27 Jul 2009 07:01 AM PDT
Apparently, it's not an easy thing to do, though – something about practice, and talent, and not making any money. I forget. Either way, most of us are probably doomed to forever listening, watching and reading brilliant comedy than creating it ourselves. If you're looking for some hilarious jokes and great stand up comedy, check out The Laugh Button. It's a site, kind of like the Hype Machine or We Are Hunted, except for genius stand up comedy. It's a huge database of stand-up performances, from hundreds of different comedians – from the most famous to the total unknowns.
Under “Listen”, you can see a Recommended Playlist from the Laugh Button, a Popular playlist full of what everyone else is listening to, and a list of My Favs (if you sign up for a free account, you can star certain tracks as favorites, and easily come back to them later).
Where all the material comes from is hard to figure out – the team behind the site isn't exactly forthcoming with how they do it. It appears that there's no algorithm or crawler, but that they actually go out and manually find the best stand-up comedy out there. That means that there's less of a database (though it's awfully big), but it means that what you find is almost always pretty darn funny. To keep updated on the latest and greatest from The Laugh Button, check out their Twitter and Facebook pages. Those two are the places where the Laugh Button team posts new material, information about shows, and all sorts of other things about comedy and comedians. There's new stuff coming from the Laugh Button all the time, and most of it gets posted in the statusphere; I love getting updates through Twitter. The site itself doesn't do a great job of helping you find a particular artist – it's more focused on keeping you constantly finding new people to listen to. You can, however, search through the list of artists by clicking on any single artist. Once you get to the artist page, you'll see a dropdown menu of all the comedians on the site – pick one, and you'll be listening to them in no time! You'll only see one track at a time on the artist's page, but every time you refresh the page you'll get a new one.
Since the search in The Laugh Button is awful (and by that I mean currently non-existent), you'll have to rely on Google to find exactly who you're looking for. In Google, enter this (without quotes): “site:thelaughbutton.com search term“. That'll return a Laugh Button widgets page, with your comedian's material on it. There's still a lot to come from the Laugh Machine – like search, for instance, as well as more community tools. But even now, it's a great resource for some hilarious stand-up comedy. In particular, the "recommended" playlist under "Listen" is a great way to find new comedians, and new great listening material for when you need a laugh. And come on – we all need a laugh every once in a while. Where do you go when you need a laugh online? Image Credit: henke 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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| A Beginner’s FTP Command Tutorial For Ascii or Binary File Transfers Posted: 27 Jul 2009 05:01 AM PDT
What you will need:
Assuming you know the address and the login credentials, let’s straight away hop over to the FTP client. As I mentioned before you can either use your browser as a client or use dedicated FTP software. If you want to download the occasional file or two from FTP sites you are good to do so with a browser, just type in the address of the file and make sure you use ftp:// instead of the usual http://.
If on the other hand you are managing a site or required to constantly upload/download files and manage accounts on the server you should use a FTP client designed for the task. Here are your choices:
It is easier to find your way around the GUI tools. A typical GUI client would have two panes, one showing the remote FTP directory and the other showing directories on your computer. There are buttons representing transfer between the two panes. Browse to the directories you want to transfer to/from like you would do inside Windows Explorer, click on the appropriate transfer button and the client takes care of the rest. All the commands are issued transparently by the client without requiring you to issue them explicitly. While this may seem easier, it is always handy to know what is going on behind the scenes, which you can by trying out the commands yourself.
Let’s touch up the basic FTP commands, shall we? First and foremost you need to connect to the host. Use ftp to connect to the host. The server would respond with some information including if anonymous access is allowed. If it isn’t, you will be required to enter a username and password for the FTP account on the server. Go ahead and enter those details. If you don’t know your username or password, you would have contact the administrator of the site or create a new FTP user (if you are the administrator). After a successful login you can perform any desired operations on the files. You can always use the help to get a list of available commands or get help on any command as well. Let us now see how you can perform the basic file operations over FTP: 1. Moving around
2. Set File Transfer type
3. Transferring files
4. Creating your own FTP serverIf you pay a hosting company for server space, they generally have things configured beforehand and some even create accounts for you. You can always use the management panel to create and edit FTP accounts and some settings. You would have to poke around the management panel your hosting company is providing you with. If you want to create an FTP server on your home network some configuration is needed. Windows user can try the Filezilla server. Its great and simple to use. Linux users have plenty of options out of which vsftpd is pretty straighforward and feature rich. Once you have configured the server you can access your files from any computer on your home network, using the IP address of the FTP server. If you want to be able to access your server from across the Internet you would require a static IP or perhaps you could look into something like dyndns (which we discussed briefly while configuring remote access to your torrents). That’s it, you have enough knowledge to get you started and help you along whenever working with FTP. Let us know if you use some other tools for similar purposes. 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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I’m back again to bring you the next trick in my arsenal of Photoshop goodies. The subject today is color correction. Specifically RGB color correction, for web and screen (monitor, tv, little camera screen, iPhone) use.
Almost every blog on the web has a RSS feed to go along with it and those blogs (like mine) might have some trouble picking a good RSS icon for their site which they can include in posts, their blog theme or anywhere else on the site.
browsers today. Originally started by the Mozilla Foundation, this set of RSS icons over at 
different objects, including RSS bottles, books, printers, meat, sandwiches, omlettes, lights, melons and more (no, i’m not kidding!).
Brazilian designer Dirceu Veiga created another neat set of icons for Smashing Magazine.
includes RSS logos with plus icons, minus icons, share icons as well as some others.
Almost everyone is familiar with the most commonly used file formats – for music, mp3 and wmv, for video, avi and mpeg, and for images, jpeg and gif. Unfortunately, these common formats are not the only ones we run into on a daily basis. On any given day, we are likely to also see .flv on Youtube or .pdf while opening documents.
I must admit that over the past decade, Google has surpassed everything I ever imagined might be possible to do on the Internet. The first time I knew that Google was on to something major was when a friend tipped me off to 
I think, at some point or another, most of us have wanted to be a stand-up comedian. Come on – getting up on stage, talking about…whatever, and making endless numbers of people laugh? What could be better than that?
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is a simple and secure way to exchange files over the Internet. There are two players involved in any FTP transfer – the server or the site which is hosting the files and the client which contacts the server and requests to transfer a file. You can either use your browser or you can download a specific software to run as a 
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