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- Cool Websites and Tools [November 1]
- Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo
- Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You
- Top 3 Tips To Motivate Yourself While Learning A Second Language
- Use Face Recognition to Organize Photos With iPhoto [Mac]
- Top 3 Fake News Prank Story Generators
- Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone
| Cool Websites and Tools [November 1] Posted: 01 Nov 2009 04:00 PM PST
(1) KnowYourMeme – This site archives web culture and stuff (videos, images, news and discussions) which has gone viral. The homepage has a featured meme database which shows thumbnails of popular memes. When you click on a thumbnail, it takes you to the meme page which is basically a one-stop page for all the latest information about that topic. Read more: KnowYourMeme – Internet Meme Archive
(2) PaperSpan – If you come across lots of interesting web pages during the workday that are unrelated to actual work, but would love to check them some other time, PaperSpan can help you out. It provides a browser bookmarklet that allows to save webpages online to read them later. Read more: PaperSpan – Save Webpages To Read Later (3) TaffyBox – Cool torrent search engine that lets anyone search and download torrents without BitTorrent client installed. It provides a browser based Java applet that runs in your browser and downloads files for you. Perfect for people who find the usual BitTorrent clients too complicated to use. Read more: TaffyBox – Find & Download Torrents Without Torrent Client (4) MakeMyRingtone – Mobicious powered web utility that allows you to upload a song from your computer, turn it into a ringtone and then get it delivered to your cellphone. The application is free and there is no sign up. Read more: MakeMyRingtone – Create a Ringtone From an MP3 Online (5) Tracked – If you are into tracking companies, stock and executives then there couldn't be a better and comprehensive site than Tracked.com for that purpose. The site, which was launched recently, features a huge database of businesses and their employees, their financial information, latest news about them, their stock growth and much more. Read more: Tracked – Comprehensive Database of Businesses & People
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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| Design Your Own Online Portal Website for Free with Zooloo Posted: 01 Nov 2009 02:00 PM PST
Zooloo consists of the following components that you can use to design your own portal website for free:
Homepage with Social NetworkingThe homepage has a search box at the top, zStatus and zSocial on the main page, and widgets on the right to upload photos, access email, calendar and your blog.
You can choose the background of your home page from several themes. Your DashboardYou pick and choose widgets to create your personalized dashboard. The dashboard is organized with tabs at the top, so you can create multiple tabs for different areas of interest. Clicking Add Widgets opens up a gallery of widgets that you can drag and drop to any tab on your dashboard. Widgets that need access to your login or profile need to be customized from the Options button on that widget.
The widget gallery is quite impressive – some of the popular types include:
You can see the list of widgets available in Zooloo here. From within your dashboard, you can listen to podcasts and watch videos without leaving your site. You can rearrange widgets with drag and drop and customize the theme. Your dashboard is private, so nobody else sees it at any time. Build Your Zooloo WebsiteWith a free Zooloo account, you get a yourname.zooloo.com website for free. Your website includes profile, photo, video, graffiti, blog, and three custom pages. With a $30 annual subscription for Zooloo Plus, you can use it with your own domain name and some extras. The zCreator website builder is very easy to use. You can choose from different layouts and themes for your website. You add content placeholders by drag and drop and fill them with the text and images to build your website.
Each page of your website is private by default. You can choose to share individual pages, photo albums, and videos publicly, or with specific friends on Zooloo. The privacy settings are easy to use and offer granular control over who sees what on your website. Blogging and GraffitiZooloo also offers a simple interface to add a blog to your website. The blogging service supports categories, comments, and photos/videos. You can also import your blog from Blogger.
Graffiti is Zooloo's social bookmarking or clipping service. Using a bookmarklet from any browser, you can quickly clip a link, photo, or video on your Graffiti page. Graffiti posts also have comments so you can comment on your friends Graffiti items. More About ZoolooZooloo is an easy-to-use, attractive option for non-geeks to have their own website and a central place for social networking and infotainment. The owners of the site say that they are not competing with established social networks like Facebook, but complementing them. There are already over 20,000 users of Zooloo from each state in the US and 76 countries. Users are buying from within their shopping malls inside Zooloo using PayPal. There are plans for an iPhone application as well. Will you try out Zooloo or recommend it to someone? Do you prefer any other free website/dashboard service? 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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| Songr – A Desktop MP3 Search Engine That Also Downloads Songs for You Posted: 01 Nov 2009 12:00 PM PST
Copyright and DRM issues notwithstanding, downloading music off the net is one of the most popular web trend. As Google says, two of the top 10 queries in the U.S. are music-related. That's probably the same around the world. So where do you go in search of your music? Do you carry out a generic search using one of the search engines? Do you use a specific MP3 search engine? Maybe you picked out one from our Free MP3 Downloads: 7 Websites That Make It Really Easy post. Or you just like to stream it over the waves using the online music players. Thank God, there are options galore for the music lover. Songr is a desktop search software that will not only search out the right song for you but also downloads it for you. But why a desktop alternative to download songs, I ask?Music can be downloaded via P2P software too and you can also use MP3 search engines on the web. P2P software to download a single off the cuff track is bit of overkill and MP3 search engines are great but they might have a bad server day. Also, Songr offers some features that bump up its appeal in my ears. Songr has three noteworthy features which make downloading a single click affair. 1. Meta-search with 10 online MP3 search enginesGive Songr a song title in its search box placed on the top right and the software taps into 10 MP3 search engines to get the song. It gathers the results, removes duplicates and displays it all on its frugal interface.
Take your fine-tooth comb and go through the results which can be bracketed according to Duration, Bitrate, Size and Relevance (just click the column heads to arrange). The low bitrate results are grayed out and usually, you will find the songs with a higher relevance on top of the heap. If you choose to buy the tracks, you can check them out at Amazon and Rhapsody using the shortcut from the menu. The search engines used by Songr are displayed in the screenshot below taken from the Songr features page.
2. YouTube audio extractionSongr plucks out audio tracks as MP3 from YouTube videos using some sort of a FFmpeg converter. Songr uses JusthearIt.com's engine to tap into YouTube's resources. You can see it in the results as a little video icon. You get two options with a right click – Play it as a video directly on YouTube or download it as an MP3 audio track, an AVI video or a MPEG video to your computer.
You also get to choose between the HQ version and the slower but better HD version (if available). 3. Search by lyricsSongr uses Bing as a search service to get you the songs when you type in a few words from the songs. According to the software's FAQ – Songr searches the words you typed in Bing plus adding “lyrics” to the query, reads the titles of the results, filters those using heuristic techniques and tries to restore the original case.
Well as long as I get the results! I got some hits and misses with this one. I guess it boils down to Bing's penetration and the lyrics with the song's search engine indexed existence. If I could add a number four, it would be its simple ad-free interface. That's what I liked – no glitz, no glamour but just focused on the job. There isn't anything by way of settings. It uses the system's default music player to play the track. Such basic software should be light on resources, which it is – consuming about 3.5MB of memory at its peak YouTube conversion job. We had covered a desktop app for searching MP3 ditties before too. You might like to try out Clickster and look at it against Songr's performance. Does this simple software deserve an encore? Songr (v1.2) is a measly 452KB download and it plays along with Windows XP, Vista and 7. It only asks for the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. 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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| Top 3 Tips To Motivate Yourself While Learning A Second Language Posted: 01 Nov 2009 10:00 AM PST
The only other strategy that you have when you're at home is to buy a few text books, a pocket-sized dictionary and begin wading through a river of despair and hopelessness. Or is it the only other strategy? Recently I resumed learning French. I was never any good at it in school – mostly because the above strategy was applied. But only a few months into my new endeavour, I'm currently halfway through a classic French novel called 'La Guerre des Boutons'. How? I took the geeky way out i.e. I immersed myself in an environment filled with French – it's called the Internet (you may have heard about it). Here are my top three tips to help you with learning a second language online. Using Popular Websites in That Language
Allow me to explain this one. I don't mean use every single website in French/Spanish/ Polish etc. What I do mean is to use large sites in the foreign language you’re trying to learn. Make a list of the five largest websites you use regularly. I'm willing to bet that Google is in there. EBay is likely to have made the cut. Maybe even Amazon? Basically just jot down your favourite sites and start using them in a foreign language. The reason I'm telling you to do this is not to have you utterly confused but to teach you. You see, these large websites generally use simple sentences and popular words. Take EBay; it doesn't have many long rambling paragraphs, rather just plain words and phrases. All of the different categories will undoubtedly be useful words and what's more they're often associated with pictures. You can also get a bargain on expensive products on native language sites where demand is lower. Using sites such as Google and Yahoo can give you some more basic words as well as seeing some of the French news headlines. This is not an intensive way of learning a language. In fact, it’s fairly passive and doesn’t require too much effort. Word a Day TweetTwitter has escalated in popularity over the last year or so and it’s the perfect platform for a Word a Day regime. You probably tweet multiple times a day (and if not, where have you been for the past year?) so why not make a few of those tweets count for something.
By following this service in the particular language you’re learning, you’ll be tweeted a word which you must use in a logical sentence in one of your own tweets that day. Again, this is a passive way of learning a language. By fitting it into your already existing routine you’re not climbing a whole new mountain. BBC LanguagesPart of the BBC’s website is devoted to teaching people how to speak different languages. This section is packed with interesting ways of learning a language rather than learning off boring verb sheets.
For example, they have videos of people in everyday situations such as in meeting people, dining in restaurants, going to bars, at work etc. These videos are accompanied by a transcript so you can read through the words and understand it fully. There are are different difficulty settings depending on whether you’re starting fresh or have been learning the language for some time. If you combine the BBC language course with the two passive learning methods above you’ll be on your way to speaking fluently in no time. It also wouldn't hurt to subscribe to a few blogs in your chosen language. See my post here on MUO about Reading Blogs On Your Cellphone With A Java RSS Reader. Also, you might want to check out Angie’s post if you’re looking for online resources to learn foreign languages: 18 Great Sites to Learn a New Language. What’s your method of learning a new language. Do you have any self-taught tricks? 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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| Use Face Recognition to Organize Photos With iPhoto [Mac] Posted: 01 Nov 2009 08:00 AM PST
With today’s limit set at terabytes, you can literary store millions of photos. Our problem now is not choosing what to shoot, but how to organize the photos afterward. For most amateur photographers, the term “organizing photos” goes as far as collecting them into albums based on events, or maybe by the people in the images. While grouping photos chronologically by events is often done easily and automatically every time you move the photos from the camera to computer, sorting photos based on the people in each picture is not as easy as it sounds. Especially if you have to do it manually. Recognizing the facesThe mundane task of how to organize photos can now be done easily and almost automatically using iPhoto. This photo management application that comes with iLife suite offers its users the ability to assign names to faces and organize the pictures based on the person in the photos. This feature is called Faces. And using it, users can click and open every photo that contain a specific person in all of them.
Then click the “Name” icon located on the bottom left of iPhoto’s window.
The chosen picture will be enlarged to fill the window. Click the “Add Missing Face” button that replaced the “Name” icon.
You’ll see that iPhoto will try its best to locate faces inside the picture. A square will appear around the faces with the tag “unnamed” below it.
All you have to do is double-click the tag and replace “unnamed” with that person’s name. Repeat the process for other “unnamed” tags, and you can continue to do the same for other pictures with faces of different people. From here on, things will get easier because iPhoto will help you by trying to recognize the same faces that have been tagged before. If you choose a photo with a previously tagged person in it, iPhoto will ask you to confirm the name.
Click the check mark to confirm or the cross to tell iPhoto that the name is incorrect. However, no machine can replace the human ability to recognize faces. The Faces feature of iPhoto is amazing indeed, but it still makes stupid mistakes here and there. Once it thought that my little daughter’s dress was a face.
Mass naming the facesIf you have thousands of pictures, it’s possible that you’d be wiping off cold sweat right now thinking about renaming faces thousands of times. But you don’t have to be afraid, because iPhoto provides you with a way to do it almost automatically. Almost, but still better than having do it manually one photo at a time. Click “Faces” on the left pane and choose one of the faces appear on the right.
While you are at it, you can edit the person’s full name and add email address to each face by choosing “File –> Get Info” menu or Command + I or by clicking the small “i” icon at the right bottom of the image.
After choosing a person, the screen will show you all the photos with that person in them. If you scroll down a little bit, you will see the second half of the screen labelled “So-and-so may also be in the photos below”.
Choose a close up view and “Confirm Name” from the bottom menu.
All the photos will focus on the possible faces of the chosen person. Your job is to click on every frame with the correct image to confirm the name to the faces. You could minimize or enlarge the size of the box by moving the slider, located at the bottom right of the screen.
There are other cool iPhoto abilities but we’ll save them for another time. Do you use iPhoto to manage your photos? Do you know of other alternative photo management applications for Mac? Share using 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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| Top 3 Fake News Prank Story Generators Posted: 01 Nov 2009 06:00 AM PST
People will catch on, however (well, hopefully). You could try searching for similar parody sources in our Top 10 Websites for Fake News & Satire, but it eventually becomes a prank that can only be pulled on easy targets like your grandparents or technologically unsavvy parents. How about a way to create your own fake news prank headlines? With the ability to add a little personal touch by customizing names and stories, you can make your article more believable or outrageous with fake news story generators. Here’s the three best ones. WasArrestedWasArrested is one of the best websites to create your own fake news prank story. It’s very simple and quick to do. Start off by typing in the victim’s name, city, and gender.
Then comes the fun part of choosing which story you want. You can select anything from “Has Sex With Sheep” to “Drinks From The Toilet.” If you don’t see a story you like, you can write one up yourself and even upload an image to go along with the article.
There it is. According to what looks like CNN’s site, I was arrested for indecent exposure! Looks pretty legitimate to me. FakeAWishFakeAWish is sort of the celebrity version of WasArrested. First, simply type in the first and last name of any star of your choice. I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings (I know, I know), so I took it upon myself to use my own name again.
As for the stories you can pick, most of them don’t look too good for your celebrity target, ranging from missing, hospitalized, or just dead. What have I gotten myself into this time?
The end result is an article on what looks like a classic Yahoo! News page with the story you selected. In this case, some news agency called Global Associated News is reporting that I’m presumed dead in a private plane crash. Can’t they get anything right?
FodeyIf you’re looking to create a fake newspaper clipping, head over to Fodey. Just think up of a completely made-up story and have it look like it was published on some newspaper’s front page. It’s really easy to do. Type in name of the newspaper, the date, and start entering in whatever news article you can come up with.
Once you’ve generated the newspaper clipping, you can preview it and download the image.
There you have it. It’s 2036, MakeUseOf is now a newspaper, and Google is taking over the world. Huh. Looking for more fun? MUO’s Directory of Apps has got details on DeadFake, a fake email service, and HoaxCall, an online prank call maker. Go ahead and try out the fake news story generators for yourself. Are any of them crowd pleasers? Let us know in the comments. Related posts
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| Lose It! – A Calorie Intake Calculator for the iPhone Posted: 01 Nov 2009 04:00 AM PST
Working as a code churner by day and a writer by night hardly leaves me with any time to exercise those (lazy) muscles, so the only other thing that I can do is limit the number of calories I take in. That, as you all know, is easier said than done. For example, how are you going to stop yourself from eating that Big Mac (with extra cheese!) for lunch or the Chicken Tikka Masala with Cheese Naan for dinner unless you know how many calories it has before ordering it. Nothing better to lose your appetite than a guilt trip! That is exactly what Lose It! will help you with. Lose It! is an iPhone calorie intake calculator that acts as your personal guilt trip service by telling you exactly how many calories each of your meals has and how much you need to exercise to reach your weight loss goals.
Now, as you go through the day, you need to either Add Food or Add Exercise to Lose It!. The goal is to remain below the daily calories budget that you’ve been assigned. Easy enough for you ? Lose It! has a pretty large database of the common types of food that we eat and the calories that they add. For example, I ate a Big Mac for lunch today. Let’s add that bit of info to the Lose It! calorie intake calculator. Tap on Add Food and select Lunch. Since McDonalds is a pretty famous name, we’ll just search for it under Brand Name Foods -> Restaurant Foods. Type in McDonalds. Select what you ate from the list and Lose It! will show you the number of calories that your meal contained, and ask you to enter the quantity that you ate.
As you can see, I’m not doing too well with my diet plans. The Big Mac for lunch and the Burger King Whopper for dinner really doesn’t help me with my goal of losing 1lb a week.
So, let’s exercise a bit and add my workout to Lose It!. I love playing squash and since I have a squash court close to where I live, that’s what I’ll play. Of course, with my current fitness levels, an hour of squash is all that I can last for! Click on the ‘+’ sign and select Exercise. Browse for the extensive list of sports available, select Squash and move the counter to 1 hour.
Ha! I’m still under 1685 calories for the day! I guess I can reward myself with that dessert! So, you see, Lose It! is not only a very good application to help you track what you’ve eaten, it’ll also tell you just how much you can afford to splurge on yourself and still be on track to losing those extra pounds. How do you guys plan your diet? Do you like to keep track of the calories you’re consuming? Image credit: bensonkua Related posts
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Perhaps there are very few things in this world that give so much joy packed in a bundle of a few megabytes. That's an MP3 song for you. But where do you go to get your music? Google Music Search is still out of reach for many of us. And it's not whistling a free tune right now. All you will get are audio previews from Google's music partners. Ever since the era of Napster, 'free' has been a birthright isn't it…every search result should open the door to the free-way.
With the dawn of digital cameras and the ever increasing capacity of storage, the world of photography enters the era of abundance. Anybody can shoot as many pictures as they want to, as long as they still have room in their hard drives and/or memory cards.
There’s nothing better than someone actually believing that an article from The Onion is real. Just email a friend a link to one of their satirical stories and if they haven’t heard of the site or are just not paying attention, they may very well fall for it.
If you have a desk job like I do, and are as fond of food as I am, you really must be having tough time dealing with all the (unwanted) calories. I know I do.
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