Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com |  |
- Cool Websites and Tools [September 30]
- DeSmuME- Free Nintendo DS Emulator to Play NDS Games on PC
- 5 Best Sites To Check For Company Product Recalls
- Build A Database Of Your Professional Networks With Gist
- BBC Memoryshare – Create Your Own Archive of Memories for Posterity
- Top 10 Activities To Do When There’s A Power Outage
- Clean Up Your PC Safely with Hard Drive PowerWash (Windows)
| Cool Websites and Tools [September 30] Posted: 30 Sep 2009 06:01 PM PDT
(1) Lunchster – New online application that makes scheduling lunches with friends and colleagues really fast and easy. The cool thing about it is that the whole process is fully automated, all you need to do is pick your dates and add people with whom you want to have lunch. Next, Lunchster will send everyone and email, gather responses and schedule everything onto your lunch calendar.Read more: Lunchster – Quick Way To Schedule Lunches With Friends
(2) nOOkist – Website which enables you to track your sex life online and gives you some insight about it with stats, charts and reports. You can also track of your STD tests and receive notifications on when your results are going to expire. Read more: nOOkist – Track Personal Sexual History Online (3) ThisDayInTech – Interesting historical tech calendar from Wired.com. Every day it features a historical reference of events and inventions that happened on that day starting from 18th century, which in one way or another were important for the advancement of general technology. Read more: ThisDayInTech – Historical Tech Events Calendar From Wired (4) CleanCSS – Handy online application for quickly optimizing and formatting Cascading Style Sheets online. In other words it allows to make your CSS well organized and clean. Read more: CleanCSS – Optimize and Format CSS Online (5) QuietAgent – Anonymous job matching website that helps you find jobs based on information you provide. It is just like a dating website but only for jobs. You simply fill in your details, indicate skills and preferences, and QuietAgent will search and find matching jobs. Read more: QuietAgent – Anonymous Job Search Site
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
| ||
| DeSmuME- Free Nintendo DS Emulator to Play NDS Games on PC Posted: 30 Sep 2009 03:00 PM PDT
Note that downloading retail .nds ROMs is of questionable (il)legality – more of a black area than gray as the games are still current generation – sold and marketed as of right now. If you want to stay on the legal side, use homebrew ROMs instead. We’ll be covering the Windows version of DeSmuME. Fetch the latest Windows binary from their website. You should have downloaded a zip archive. Extract it to its own folder, and you should see several files, including DeSmuME.exe, which is the Nintendo DS emulator itself. Downloading GamesWe can’t condone downloading the retail DS games’ ROMs, though we’re quite sure you know the common avenues. Your second option is to find homebrew DS ROMs – this website has a small collection of them, but you may need to click through to developer websites to see more of their own projects. In the end, you’ll usually end up downloading an archive including an nds file – this file is the one you want. For our own purposes, we’ll be downloading “Yoshi’s Bad Brother,” a homebrew game, from this developer. Playing the GamesWhen all is downloaded and unarchived, you should end up with an nds file, and perhaps a readme or other files.
Load up DeSmuME and File > Open ROM…
Browse to your nds file, and hit Open.
The game will load – the bottom half of the Nintendo DS emulator is for the “touchscreen” input, which you control with your mouse, and the top is the top screen of your “DS”. You can find the various key bindings in the Config > Control Config. Basic FunctionsWe’ll be outlining some of the basic functions of the emulator: File
Emulation
View
Cheating in DeSmuMECheating is quite rudimentary in DeSmuME. We’ll be showing a simple example using the game New Super Mario Bros.
Head over to Emulation > Cheats > Search. A window will pop up, asking for the number of bytes and search type. For our example, we’ll stick with the defaults.
You’ll be prompted to enter a value. Since we’re going to freeze the number of lives, we entered 10, which was our current number of lives.
The window will tell you the number of results. Close the dialog (do not click Restart).
Change the number of lives. We went in and lost a life to reduce the number of lives we had to 9. Go back to Emulation > Cheats > Search, and enter the new number (ours would be 9) and hit Search. The number of results should have dropped significantly (I ended up with 4). You can either die again and search a new number to reduce the number of results again, or just add all the values. Either way, once you’re done, hit View, and select each value and click Add.
You can either freeze the value, or change it. I opted to freeze it, and clicked Add. That’s all – for a more detailed guide, view DeSmuME’s guide. That’s all the basic functions of DeSmuME. Download it at their website. If you have any questions or issues, please voice out in the comments. 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
| ||
| 5 Best Sites To Check For Company Product Recalls Posted: 30 Sep 2009 01:01 PM PDT
Did you know that in the United States of America, you could be fined up to $15 million for selling recalled items? According to Fox News’ article, New Government Policy Imposes Strict Standards on Garage Sales Nationwide, that could, indeed, happen. Don’t live in the grand old U.S. of A.? It stands to reason that this law may be coming to a yard sale near you, anyway. Internationally speaking, large countries can set the standard that other countries follow, with respect to law. So, how do you know if you have a recalled product? Fortunately, a lot of countries’ governments have websites to help you identify hazardous items. That’s what this article is for!
U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)
At the site you can search on products, see latest product recalls in the United States, or even send a complaint about a product. More specifically, the CPSC has a handbook to help you out. You might want to download a copy of the 24-page Handbook for Resale Stores and Product Resellers. Warning, it’s a PDF file. Recalls Australia
That being said, Recalls Australia provides some services to help you stay on top of recalls. They provide an email subscription service that provides you with daily alerts about categories that you are interested in. Maybe you’re a parent and want to get daily updates on toys. This would be a good service. Also, you can subscribe for customized RSS feeds that are updated hourly. Moreover, they now provide advanced search options, so you can narrow down to a product that you are researching. Well worth the time for our Australian friends. UKRecallNotice
UKRecallNotice relies on updates from the Trading Standards Institute as well as from searching newspapers. From there, they categorize the notices, making recalls easier to find. They also have an e-mail list that you can join to get the daily recalls. Hopefully, they’ll branch into providing an RSS feed as well. That’s always nice. Health Canada
Well, apparently it means anything but vehicles, food, drugs and health products, and pest control products. Because we know what a hassle it is to have information like this all in one place. Note the Canadian sarcasm. To my friends in India, being one of the largest groups of our readers, I’m sorry, but I can’t seem to find a good product recall site for there. I don’t know if it’s because I’m searching in English or not, yet if you know of one, please share it with the rest of the readers in the comments. I urge all of our readers from ANY country to share their country’s product recall site in the comments. Obviously, I can’t include all the countries but with you adding links, we can compile a good list. Perhaps this list might one day save someone’s life. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of that? 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
| ||
| Build A Database Of Your Professional Networks With Gist Posted: 30 Sep 2009 11:00 AM PDT
What is Gist?Gist aims to help you control information overload by focusing on people and companies that are important to you. First, Gist gets information from your inbox and social networking accounts to build a database of your network. It then monitors the web for information about the people and companies in your network. Using the concept of “importance”, it then provides customizable views of people and companies, showing you news, blog posts, tweets, etc. for each of them. Your Dashboard becomes a “intelligent reader” thus giving you insight into critical updates that are important to you. Get Started By Connecting AccountsGist allows you to connect a variety of sources using built-in business networking techniques to build your network database. At present, you can integrate your email from Outlook, Gmail or any service that supports IMAP. Your professional contacts can come from LinkedIn, Salesforce, or any CSV file. Note that Gist doesn't connect with LinkedIn at present, hence you need to export and import your LinkedIn contacts.
Social networking contacts can be imported from Facebook and Twitter. Gist also offers an Outlook plug-in so that you can use it from within Outlook. To use Gist effectively, you will need to personalize it as described later in this article, but first let's look at the powerful views Gist offers. Dashboard ViewThe Dashboard is your top-level view to get all the news about your network. It is a RSS news feed reader, Twitter client, and Calendar rolled into one, with optional widgets showing shared links and attachments received in your email inbox.
You can customize the Dashboard to show Recent News, or news from people you've recently contacted or added. Information displayed can be filtered by date, content source, importance and tags. You can search to quickly find people, companies, attachments, or shared links. You can also share any information item from your Dashboard to Facebook or Twitter. In this way, Gist goes beyond an "intelligent reader" to being a "intelligent networking" tool. People and Companies ViewThe People and Companies tabs organize your contacts according to importance. It shows your email history and stats, the last time you were in contact, number of contacts from a company, and so on, for each person and company in your network.
You can search to find and manage contacts, or add new contacts manually. You can sort the view using any of the column headers, and use tags to filter the view. For each person or company, you can edit their names, add tags, and adjust their importance. You can merge duplicates, and use multi-select to perform bulk operations. Finally, you can instruct Gist whether to Watch a person or contact for news updates.
Profile ViewGist Profile pages are a central place to find out everything about the people and companies in your network. Gist scans your email accounts, calendars, contact databases such as LinkedIn, and social networks like Facebook and Twitter, to create unified profiles for each person or company. Gist is continuously searching for new information about your contacts even when you're not using it.
The What's New section pulls blog posts, tweets, and news from thousands of sources with sharing and filtering tools. You can flag items, mark them as read, share items via email, Facebook, or Twitter, or dismiss them as not relevant. The right-hand side shows searchable widgets such as aggregated conversations, shared links and attachments. Shared Contacts shows related people with links to their profiles. There is even a Google Search widget pre-populated with search results that can be customized with your own search term. Profile information can be manually edited and updated. If the Gist profile doesn't have it already, you can add a relevant image, website, phone number, address, and tags. The best way to organize your contacts is to use tags. Finally, a cool Dossier feature provides a printable version of a profile that you can use before meeting or communicating with a person. Optimize To Get The Most Out Of GistAfter initially building your Gist contacts network, I recommend that you spend some time tweaking it for your needs. I found this necessary because:
Are you excited about Gist using as an intelligent networking tool? Did you like the post? Tell us 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
| ||
| BBC Memoryshare – Create Your Own Archive of Memories for Posterity Posted: 30 Sep 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Personal memoirs provide us with lessons in history that a classroom textbook cannot replicate. It was a chance discovery while hunting for web tidbits on the Moon landings that gave me an insight through someone's contributed memory. If you go to the site and type in 'moon' you will get quite a few others. So what exactly is BBC Memoryshare?Is it just meant to be an online keeping place of user contributed personal memoirs or does it add more value with the BBC stamp? BBC Memoryshare is positioned as a living archive of memories from 1900 to the present day. Life experiences are pieced together as a mash of linked videos, images and text commentary. But the USP is that these digital anecdotes are in the context of recent and historical events. Like a timeline but more personal. Memories take the form of text, photos and videos. Users are invited to contribute and build up the content and relate it to dates. With the passing of time these collective memories become a historical record of events.
What's in it for BBC?In their own words:
What's in it for us?The serious and the not-so-serious user can read or watch these memory snippets, research background events and tie in to context material even going back as far as January 1st 1900. You can search for memories against a particular day or event by using the search box.
Contributions apart, it is also a place for people to peep into the life events of others. Just like any other social media site, users can comment on the personal memoirs of others. The growing collection of memories straddles the other BBC sites as well; wherever content can be enriched with a personal recollection. The list can be found in the About page. Contributing your own memoriesTo be a part of BBC Memoryshare takes a free signup. It's a quick four step process where you have to settle a username, go over the rules, give some personal info and verify your email.
BBC says that sometimes it contacts users who send in memories and asks them to be a part of their program. That's a bit of an incentive to give some valid contact info. To be a part of a BBC program and sharing your experience is a memory of its own.
A log-in later, you are ready to upload your memory hopefully for posterity. Clicking on the Add your own memory large button takes you to the first of several panels.
Give your memory a Title. Give a description of What Happened. The more descriptive and true to life you are the better. For a more graphic job, you can include web links and links (only) to images and videos. To be more specific pin it down to a date and a location. The final panel is for entering some keywords which really help to index the memory for search. All that done… You can now publish your memory, or you can preview it and go back to edit any mistakes. The profile page keeps track of all memories you have submitted. You can add, edit or delete your memories here. The BBC hopes it to be a lasting archive. After all, memories are supposed to last forever. BBC Memoryshare is a social sharing site with a slight historical twist and the added extra of the BBC track record. Though the site may sound and look Euro centric, it does have universal appeal. There are many places around the web where we can park our memories. How does BBC Memoryshare sound to you? 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
| ||
| Top 10 Activities To Do When There’s A Power Outage Posted: 30 Sep 2009 07:00 AM PDT
The first thing that happens when the power goes out is that the food in the refrigerator begins to thaw. The second thing is that the house begins to heat up (or get cold, depending upon where and when). These two things mean very little. Somewhere within driving range the power is on and food is available. As long as the car starts, heat or air conditioning is nearby. During a long term power outage, you milk every electron for all it’s worth. You keep working on your computer, draining the battery, certain the power company workers will flip the right switch and you’ll be saved. As luck has it, you get the ‘Critical Battery Level’ warning and you curse the weather or the power company, or both. Oh well, your smart phone still has plenty of juice. Another hour playing with ring tones, free pre-loaded games, and sending emails, and you notice the dreaded red-rimmed battery indicator. You look for your charger only to realize the power is still off, and it will do you no good. Before you end up on the verge of a nervous breakdown and you are found by the rescue squad cowering and crying in a corner with a flashlight in your hand, flicking it on and off; take heart. There is a world out there that is not hard wired to electricity. Here are the top ten power outage activities you can do to maintain your sanity.
What is unique about Zeemaps is that you can upload your CSV files and map them. If you want to map customers, suppliers, friends, or WiFi spots this site can do it simply by uploading the CSV file with the address. Of course, you can manually locate markers as well, or use GPS coordinates.
So get busy creating a list of your WiFi spots and mapping them before the power goes out again. You can color code markers or use special icons – basic hot spots get a green marker, ones that also have plenty of electrical outlets available get a yellow marker and hot spots with outlets, real books, java, and board games get a red marker!
In addition to the tips I’ve offered, other MUO authors have provided tips like 20 Ways to Increase Your Laptop’s Battery Life and Five Ways to Reduce the Power Consumption of Your Computer. Make sure to check them out as well. What do you do when there is a prolonged power outage? 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
| ||
| Clean Up Your PC Safely with Hard Drive PowerWash (Windows) Posted: 30 Sep 2009 05:00 AM PDT
That program is called Hard Drive Power Wash. Let's check it out. I started by downloading the free version of Hard Drive Power Wash from here. Using this application, I can schedule the clean up so it can be totally automated. You know set it and forget it. Once you get this 2.05 MB file you will need to install it. Then you will see a screen that looks like this.
You can either run or analyze everything or hit the menu on the left for your options:
*._tm / *.1st / *.bak / *.nav / *.log / *.$$$ / *.old / *.prv / *.??~ / *.gid / *.tmp / *.syd / *.~* / *.~mp / *~.* / *.bk! / *.bk$ / *.bk4 / *.bk5 / *.bk6 / *.bk7 / *.bk8 / *.bk9 / *.bkp / *.$a / *.$db / *.&&& / *.— / *._dd / *._mp / *.chk / *.xlk / *.db$ / *.diz / *.dmp / *.err / *.ftg / *.fts / *.ilk / *.ncb / *.pch / *.sik / *.temp / chklist.* / mscreate.dir / pspbrwse.jbf / Thumbs.db The process took some time to run and you will see its progress as it goes like so:
It continued to run for about another 7 minutes and then spat back this report at me:
Wow, I was surprised and impressed in the same breathe. It found a crap-load of files that after clicking through, seemed to be nothing that I needed. Look through each tab and scroll through the files before giving it the OK to kill them. They are all selected by default. You have buttons to select all or none at the bottom of your screen. You will get your confirmation box alerting you that these files will really be deleted.
Hit Yes and watch as it deletes them. It runs through each segment like log files, images etc. and deletes each file. My internet files took almost 10 minutes to delete on their own. Can you imagine how much crap was in there? When its done you will see a the first screen again now populated with your results. I got rid of a whopping 636 Megabytes!
I am super happy and off to schedule it from the program’s settings:
Do you have a favorite program that will clean a hard drive like Hard Drive Power Wash? We would love to hear about it 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
|
Various console and handheld emulators have been developed – usually dedicated to supporting legacy, older generation systems. DeSmuME is a free cross-platform Nintendo DS emulator (the latest on Nintendo’s handheld line), letting you play DS games right from your computer. We’ll be showing you how to download and run DeSmuME, as well as basic functions it can perform.
How many garage sales have you had, or been to, that have had items for sale that were recalled by the manufacturer? You don’t know do you? I know I don’t.
The CPSC is the federal commission behind the crackdown on selling recalled items in white elephant sales. Although the law may be hard to comply with, due to the sheer number of recalled products, at least they try to help.
The rest of these sites aren’t a whole lot different in content than the CPSC, however, it’s important to list them as MakeUseOf has a lot of viewers from these countries as well.
It seems odd that this site appears to be independently run. The United Kingdom’s official recall site seems to be the 
My home country’s site leaves a lot to be desired as well. Note the lame logo. This particular page does have search capabilities, but is limited to consumer products. What does that mean?
At first look, it seems strange that a name like BBC is prefixed with a web service that calls itself 
As a technology addict, when the power is out and electrons quit flowing, my world can lock up pretty quickly. Thanks to batteries, a short power outage goes unnoticed. However, if you live in an area beleaguered with storms, multiple car-into-a-pole vehicle accidents, or poor electrical service, you may often see a longer term power outage.
Do you wonder how much space is wasted on your Windows machine by old temp files and files that you have no need for? Do you really need all of your internet temp files going back 2 years? How about all those annoying thumbs.db files? I found a application that will clean your hard drive of a huge amount of files and recover your precious space.
Let's start running the Analyze process by hitting the analyze button at the bottom of the user interface. That will get the ball rolling. The program advises not to just start the Run process willy nilly because you should see what it is going to delete before it actually does it. It will look for and annihilate the following file types (per their website)
| You are subscribed to email updates from MakeUseOf.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment