Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com |  |
- How To Improve iCal With FlexCal [Mac Only]
- Cool Websites and Tools [November 7]
- 5 Ways to Protect & Hide Your Email to Stop Receiving Spam
- 3 Best Sites To Download Free Funny Voicemail Messages
- Use Your Google Apps Domain To Make Short URL’s
- MedHelp – A Mental & Physical Fitness Log To Monitor & Analyze Your Health
- 3 Great Sites To Get The Truth On MLM Pyramid Schemes
- 10 Cool Innovative Linux Wallpapers For Ubuntu Users
| How To Improve iCal With FlexCal [Mac Only] Posted: 08 Nov 2009 04:01 AM PST
But recently, I could barely keep up with everything that happened around me just relying on my biological RAM alone. While I’ve tried several free to do applications to overcome my anxiety, I couldn’t find free apps that can match the power of Apple’s iCal. So I chose iCal to help me manage my life better. One problem though, adding multiple tasks and events to iCal requires a rather lengthy process, including keeping it open at all time. Luckily, there’s FlexCal. This small application which reside in the System Preferences is designed to overcome that very problem. The installation and settingsThe installation process is quick and easy. Double click the prefPane file and choose which users you want to install this app to. Unless you use your Mac with several other users and don’t want the other users to use FlexCal, choose “Install for all users of this computer“.
There are several things that you should adjust to make FlexCal comfortable to use. First the “Setup” tab. Click the “Start FlexCal” button (obviously) and tick the “Start FlexCal at login” box to make sure that this app will be available at all time.
Then you need to set your own shortcut to be able to access FlexCal quickly. Click on the shortcut field and press your chosen combination. Don’t forget to choose which window should be opened every time you hit that shortcut key. If you add Tasks a lot, choose “Task Window“. The same thing goes the other way around. But whichever you choose, it’s not that important (and you’ll see why later on). Next is the “Advanced” tab. This is the place to further configure FlexCal. You could choose to add an alarm to all new Events and how early should the alarm goes off. You could also choose which calendar should be the default place for all tasks and events, and whether you prefer to use Textual or Graphical style to display the calendar.
Using FlexCalUsing this app is a only matter of hitting the shortcut key. If you choose “Task Window” as the default, this window will appear every time the key combination is pressed.
But you could easily change the window to “Events Window” by hitting the combination one more time (and continuously alternate between the two).
Hit enter after typing the task/event and it will be saved to iCal. To cancel it, use the Esc key. You could move between the field using the Tab key (forward) and the Shift + Tab key (backward), but you couldn’t edit the “Calendar” and “Priority” drop-down menu without using the mouse. The rodent is also needed to change the style of calendar from Textual to Graphical (and vice versa). I wish the developer would add the ability to use the keyboard to its full extent so the process of adding Tasks and Events to iCal could be done without the need to lift a finger from the keyboard. Other than that minor annoyance, FlexCal is something that every iCal user should have. Do you use iCal to manage your life? Do you know better free alternatives to add Tasks and Events to iCal quickly and easily? 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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| Cool Websites and Tools [November 7] Posted: 07 Nov 2009 05:01 PM PST
(1) Yast.com – Innovative online application that lets you keep a track of how much time you spend doing certain tasks. In its simplest form it works like a stopwatch, you create task and press the 'Play' button to start tracking the time and then press 'Stop' when you're finished. However it's not that basic, and there are some cool additional features. Read more: Yast.com – Free Web Based Time Tracker & Logbook
(2) Measy – Useful online service for frequent gadget shoppers. It helps you customize your gadget search by asking questions about your budget, size, brand and various other questions that are specific to the type of gadget you are buying. Once you are done with questions, it presents you with what it thinks would be the perfect gadget for you. Read more: Measy – Customized Online Gadget Search (3) BudgetBytes – Cool website about inexpensive food recipes which are simple to make and fast to prepare. It gives you various details for instance, a cost breakdown of each ingredient, the number of people the dish will serve, and the total preparation time. Read more: BudgetBytes – Provides Tasty & Inexpensive Food Recipes (4) GoogleTranslateTools – Another service from Google that offers some cool translation tools for both webmasters and the average internet user who wants to read webpages in different languages. The three tools offered by this service are Google's website translator, translation bookmarklets and the translation feature in Google toolbar. Read more: GoogleTranslateTools – Translate Your Site Using Google (5) GroupBoard – Website that provides embeddable and multifunctional group-boards which come with online drawing, chatting, messaging tools and games. You can easily integrate these group-boards onto your site or personal webpage and let participants collaboratively interact, chat and play games together. The app can come in very handy for things like distance tutoring or training, collaboration or interacting with your website visitors. Read more: GroupBoard – Cool Embeddable Whiteboard For Groups
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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| 5 Ways to Protect & Hide Your Email to Stop Receiving Spam Posted: 07 Nov 2009 02:01 PM PST
For the third and fourth quarter of 2008, the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group reported that approximately 90% of all eMail was spam. That’s an incredible number. It clearly demonstrates how much time and energy must be wasted to receive, identify and get rid of spam. While spam protection has become quite effective at recognizing unsolicited bulk eMail, it’s still impossible to filter out and stop receiving spam. Besides regular spam, we receive a lot of advertising in our inboxes. Although these eMails are often personalized, they still classify as spam. However, these eMails were usually created based on information we made available about ourselves, rather than straight forward eMail guessing. Hence, one way to help stop receiving spam is to control the information you’re releasing about yourself. The best way to do this is to protect and hide your eMail address.
1. Scramble your eMail address
Rather than publishing your eMail address in its standard format, you could scramble and thereby conceal it. It requires an attentive and intelligent mind to recognize a scrambled eMail address and re-assemble it into a functional format. A scrambled eMail address can look something like this: tina at make use of dot com And this is the unscrambled eMail address: tina@makeuseof.com 2. Hide your eMail address in an image
Not only does it produce an image containing your eMail address in a CAPTCHA format, it also hosts the image and provides you with a set of links you can use to embed the image in your website, signature or on social network sites. Using the bookmark feature you can directly share your eMail address with the most popular sites. Finally, the tool records how often the image has been viewed.
Similar tool: E-Mail Icon Generator. If you want to be sure only the smartest people can guess your eMail address, combine 1 and 2. 3. Encode your eMail addressIf you must post an active eMail link, for example to give people a quick and easy way to contact you, you can encode your eMail address in a way that is not readable by spambots, which extracts eMail addresses from websites. MailTO Encoder will decode your eMail address using Javascript. The result is a rather unsexy gibberish of characters.
Similar tools: E-mail Anti-SPAM Encoder (no Javascript), Hivelogic Enkoder 4. Hide eMail behind a test
At scr.im’s start page you enter your eMail address and the site will provide you with an ultra short scrimmed URL, along with custom HTML to share your eMail address on Twitter, Facebook, within HTML documents and in forums. The link will lead anyone needing your eMail address to a quick test. If they manage to pass the test, they will be rewarded with a fully active link to your eMail address.
Similar tool: reCAPTCHA, tinymail.me 5. Don’t share your eMail addressThe last resort is to not share your eMail address at all. Set up temporary inboxes or forms through which you can be contacted indirectly. For example whspr! allows you to create a temporary form, which will relay messages to your eMail address. Users have to prove they are human by passing a CAPTCHA test.
Similar tools: kontactr, contactify Summary of tools mentioned in this article:Hide eMail address in image: Encode eMail address: Hide eMail address behind test: Contact forms: MakeUseOf has previously reported on how to identify and manage eMail spam. Dean denounced Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About. Ryan explained How To Deal with Spam and Report Email Scams in the US. I outlined how to Get a Grip on eMail Spam Before It Gets A Grip On You. How do you protect yourself from too much spam? Image credits: mzacha, ItsMe1985 Related posts
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| 3 Best Sites To Download Free Funny Voicemail Messages Posted: 07 Nov 2009 12:01 PM PST
The thing that I remember and loved about answering machines were that you could buy pre-recorded messages on cassette tapes so that your callers could hear this before leaving you a message. Nowadays we all have voicemails so how can we do the same thing? Do you want Captain Picard telling your callers that you are not at home (don't worry we won't judge you – yes we will!!) then you need to head on over to one of these three ancient sites, play the recording back via your speakers and hold your cell phone up to the speakers as you are recording your message! This will work for any sound emitted from your machine so you can use this trick with any audio files and not just the ones from these old school sites. Many of the ones that I remember from way back when are very down. The first one up for funny voicemail messages is Audio Comedy's site available here
Not only do they have real answering machine messages but they also have other audio files like song parodies and stand up comedians. They also have sound boards to have fun with sounds. You can play just the parts you want and use that as your voicemail. The comedians they have available are: Carlos Mencia, Chris Rock, Daniel Tosh, George Carlin, George Lopez, Jeff Foxworthy, Kevin Meaney, Lewis Black, Margaret Cho, Pablo Fransisco, Robin Williams, Stephen Lynch and Jim Breuer. If this is up your alley you can also do this with video clips via YouTube.
You can see a glimpse of their sound boards below (I love the Eric Cartman one!- call me and see The next site up for funny voicemail messages is via AhaJokes and can be found here. This site has lots of funny audio links but the descriptions are non-existent. So unless you have lots of time to kill, this will probably make you mad. But I have found some gems on here that I have never heard before. So go exploring and enjoy!
The categories that they have are as follows: Machine Related, Authority related, Odd organizations, Musical theme, Fun with the family, Why can’t you answer it?, You are in big trouble now, Confuse or stun the caller, Science fiction and Other. Click on them play them and laugh! Let us know which are your favorites! The last site is via Silly Humor and can be found here
This site does not have a lot of recordings but the quality of them make up for it! I listened to every one on this site! You can have Spock, Picard or even Humphrey Bogart answer your phone! People might snicker or call you a dork but who cares? Don't worry, one day some one will leave you a message! Which sites do you like that offer funny voicemail messages? Let us know in the comments! Related posts
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| Use Your Google Apps Domain To Make Short URL’s Posted: 07 Nov 2009 11:01 AM PST
A better solution, if you have a Google Apps-run domain, is a service called Google Short Apps. This is a Google powered URL-shortening service you can run using your own domain and which you can customise the way you want it. The advantages include :
To get the whole lot set up on your Google Apps domain, first go here and press the “add it now” button. This immediately puts a new link on your Google Apps Dashboard.
So, the next step is to customise things the way you want them. Go to the Service Settings at the top of the Apps Dashboard page and choose Short Links. The first option you will see is naming your URL service. As I said, I chose “tinylinks” but you can choose whatever you want. But being a short URL, make your choice as small as possible. I initially contemplated “tl” but I wanted to give my shortening service a proper name. Saying that, you can have as many links as you want. So I have http://tinylinks.markoneill.org but I will also shortly set up http://tl.markoneill.org (which I will probably exclusively use from then on as it’s shorter and therefore easier to remember and type. Once you have chosen your URL-shortening name, you then have to your domain webhosting panel and make what is called a CNAME record. This is basically an instruction to your website that everytime someone goes to your URL-shortening weblink, it should automatically redirect to Google so they can do their shortening magic. Once you have set up a name for your service, Google then sets out, step-by-step, what you have to do to set up a CNAME record and it is very easy. The other options are not really that important, such as enabling API access and creating IP Whitelists. There are a couple of good options though that you should consider. They are :
OK, now that you have successfully set up your very own URL-shortening service, it’s time to start using it. Just go to your weblink that you set up and you should now see this screen :
To make a short URL, just enter the URL into the URL box. Then on the left hand side, decide what you want the link to be called and enter it into the box after your domain name. So a link to MakeUseOf could be called http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/makeuseof (click it, it works). You can also have a “hashed short link” created which is the same as TinyURL. By entering the URL and then pressing the button for a hashed short link, you would get something like http://tinylinks.markoneill.org/vhzvc. But as I said at the beginning, URL’s like that tell you nothing about the link destination so I personally won’t be using that option. You are also provided with bookmarklets which you can drag up to your browser toolbar. So any time you want to make a Google short link, just go to the webpage link you want to send out and click on the bookmarklet. You will then be taken directly to the Short Links page with the URL boxes already pre-filled with the website URL you were just on. The last feature I should mention is the stats page. The Short Links service gives you a page where you can see how many people have went to your short URLs :
On this page, each entry has an edit button so if you messed up typing the destination URL or if you want to delete one of your short URL’s, then you can do so at the click of a mouse button. All in all, this is a very nice service and I have noticed visits to my personal domain increase since I started using this. So if you do short URL’s a lot and you are also looking for a free easy way to advertise your domain, then give Short Links a try. If you don’t have your domain attached to Google Apps, then I highly recommend that you do it now. Your email can be run via Gmail and you can store all your documents via Google Docs, as well as some of the other usual Google Services (but not Google Reader, which is very strange). Plus you get little Apps goodies like Short Links. Setting up on Google Apps is also very easy and can be done in under 30 minutes. I showed you how to do it here. Which URL shortening service do you use? Do you use Google Short Links? If so, what has been your experience with 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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| MedHelp – A Mental & Physical Fitness Log To Monitor & Analyze Your Health Posted: 07 Nov 2009 10:01 AM PST
Sleep disorders, behavior disorders, obesity, diabetes and so many other ailments produce physical pains and emotional reactions that many doctors can predict, but which most of us lack the medical training or expertise to understand. This is why, especially if you’re caring for someone who is mentally or physically ill, it’s so important to track and monitor health factors such as weight fluctuations, mood swings, sleep problems and more. As the Earth gradually drifts further from the sun and the daylight hours begin to shrink, I would like to focus on an important online resource I discovered that can help you create a mental and physical fitness log to monitor and predict physical and emotional problems and get yourself or someone you love the help that they need before it’s too late.
Tracking Your Mood With a Mental Fitness LogMedHelp is a health conscious online community that, according to the website, has over 8 million members. The social community itself would require an article all of its own to review, but what I’d like to focus on are the free tools offered for free when you sign up that allow you to log dozens of mental and physical fitness factors. Having some personal experiences in the mental health field, there’s one particular tracker that I found extremely valuable and an excellent resource for anyone suffering from depression or other mood disorder – a mood tracker.
When you click on one of the mood trackers on the main MedHelp page and provide your sign-up information, you’re immediately presented the page where you can modify the particular tracker that you chose. You can customize the tracker depending what type it is. You can set the tracker to be your own mental or physical fitness log or someone else’s that your monitoring, and you can also make it public – either to just specific friends or completely open to the world (it’s surprising how many people are willing to share their personal logs. You can configure the tracker to remind you to update your mood tracker daily, weekly or monthly (or never), and finally, you can set it so that it’s customized for a particular mood disorder such as major depressive or bipolar.
The major chart area is where you click to insert your log entries, and you can scroll from month to month so that you can see the history.
On your profile page, you’ll notice the community features on the menu bar at the top. You can add friends (or family) who can view your charts, add private or public journal entries, notes, photos and of course post to various message boards about health issues. When it comes to health, having a community to ask questions and share experiences is absolutely invaluable – especially when you’re going through a major medical health crisis. There’s always someone out there who has suffered through the same thing.
When you click the “Manage” button at the right of the top menu on your profile page, you can add additional trackers to your profile. When you enter this area, get ready to be shocked by the impressive number of tracker apps that are available, including ones to track addictions, anxiety and panic attacks, baby health, cholesterol, diabetes, headaches and migraines, ovulation and even weight and exercise trackers.
Back to the mood tracker example, when you add a new item to the chart, you can choose the update based on what you’re tracking. In this case you can update what your (or your family member’s) overall mood was that day. Not only can you track mood, but you can keep track of a whole assortment of symptoms and other signs that something might be going wrong.
The items mentioned on these menus and screens hint that a doctor or some other medical professional put them together because they really do hit on the items that are relevant to what you’re trying to track.
If you want, you can even type a journal entry for the day to note an event or a situation that you want to remember later on when doctors or anyone else asks what might have caused a condition to worsen. As you enter data every day, you’ll notice a trend line developing on the large chart at the top of the tracker.
While you’re entering in your daily information, little details that may seem inconsequential all get accumulated into the big picture and the tracker shows you, in a graphical format, how all of these things – events, medicine, mental state and physical state – all factor into your sense of well-being. For example, how the change in season and shorter days has a significant negative effect on your mood (so you should plan a fall vacation!) The MedHelp library of trackers include such a variety of tools that you could use it even if you’re perfectly healthy and just want to start exercising and losing weight. There’s a weight tracker, diet tracker and an exercise tracker that can show you what exercises and food have the greatest impact on your weight and how. Here’s the summary data for an obese, 220 pound guy who sits on his chair all day writing articles (why are you assuming that’s me?)
You can set goals, monitor progress, and troubleshoot your own health with mental and physical fitness logs for every aspect of your life. You can analyze, with real information and real data from your daily life, what works and what doesn’t. By tweaking your daily life – removing what you learn has a negative effect and adding what you learn is positive – you can transform your physical and emotional well-being. Which of the tracker tools look like they may help you? Do you use any other tools to track and analyze your health? Share your feedback 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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| 3 Great Sites To Get The Truth On MLM Pyramid Schemes Posted: 07 Nov 2009 08:01 AM PST
When people feel this way, one of the opportunities that will evenutally knock on their doors is Multi Level Marketing (MLM). There are other names for it – network marketing, social marketing, direct distributing. Legally speaking, most of the legitimate companies that use this form of marketing are not pyramid schemes. At least not legally. However, they do strongly resemble pyramids in their structure. Some people do make money with these opportunities. A few make really good money! However, often what you are told or shown isn’t the whole picture. The vast majority of people lose money in these businesses. If you’re meeting with someone about an opportunity like this, be forewarned with the information from these sites.
Pyramid Scheme Alert
Here you can find information on legal proceedings against MLM companies, news about them, and alerts as well. PSA does have an e-mail list that you can sign up for, to get regular information. I find the site fairly well organized and easy to use. It appears to have the most in-depth information of the sites listed here. MLM Survivor
The original site has hundreds of pages of personal stories, research, and an MLMSurvivorsClub with over 8,000 members on Yahoo! Groups.That site is somewhat wrapped inside a new blog that functions a bit more like a news site. It appears to have been only recently resurrected, with just a few posts starting late last October. Looks like Amway is in the courts again. The Pink Lighthouse
There are dozens of personal stories to be found here. Perhaps the most common thread between them all is that the products are great! However, the personalities that they had to work with (more like work for) was the biggest problem. Lots of inventory purchasing that seldom gets sold and tons of pressure to keep buying inventory just so the upline can make their monthly goals. Apparently Mary Kay isn’t an MLM, but rather a Dual Marketing system. I’m not sure what that means, but I do know you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig. After you’ve read through these sites, I can see how you wouldn’t touch an MLM pyramid scheme with someone else’s ten foot pole. Yet still, the fact remains that there are people that make money with some of these business and there are even a few that have made millions. The question then remains, are you willing to do what it takes? Statistics only would say the odds are against you. Have you had an MLM pyramid scheme experience, good or bad? Do you know of any other resources you’d recommend to people checking out MLM’s? You’d be doing us all a favour by sharing them 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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| 10 Cool Innovative Linux Wallpapers For Ubuntu Users Posted: 07 Nov 2009 06:01 AM PST It’s difficult not to get bored of Ubuntu’s default brown look. Or perhaps even tired of waiting for the visual overhaul that’s been speculated since Hardy Heron last year. How about taking things in your hand and adding some spice to the desktop with some cool Linux wallpapers for Ubuntu? Here are 10 cool innovative Ubuntu desktop backgrounds that would appeal to the Ubuntu enthusiasts!
Looking for more? Here are a few sources you should check for these kind of wallpapers – DesktopNexus has an awesome collection of Ubuntu Wallpapers. Ubuntu-Art, DeviantArt and Flickr are other sources worthy of a mention. Having a myriad of favorite wallpapers brings forth another issue – ideally you would want to cycle through them so that you can see them all at one time or another and it also lends that little bit freshness to your desktop. Well changing wallpapers automatically is easy peasy. Try Wallpaper-Tray, its simple and straighforward. You point it to a folder, set the interval after which the wallpaper should be changed and it sets about to its task. If you are looking for something more flashy and feature rich take a look at other wallpaper changers for Linux and choose the one that suits your need. One great thing about Linux is that you can customize even the slightest of details depending upon how much time you are willing to spend on it. While the result of a custom design would be truly amazing, it requires a fair bit of hacking and time. So you might want to check out how you can browse, download and apply themes right from the Ubuntu desktop. With tons of user contributed wallpapers, themes and icons, you can easily see time flying by when choosing the ultimate look and feel according to your choice. And when you are done, let us know about it. Which themes, wallpapers and icon sets are your favorites? We would love to check them out. 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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When it comes to managing life and work, I used to be the kind of person who relied on memory alone. The furthest path I took was writing tasks on a small piece of paper and threw it away after everything was done. Call me disorganized, but somehow I survived.
eMail spam is one of the greatest annoyances of our time.
We often have to share our eMail address online. So what can be done to make it difficult for a bot to simply copy the information?
A similar solution is to hide the eMail address within an image. There are several tools that will do this for you. One which provides many other functions is 
With a tool called 
Does anyone still remember the answering machine? You know the thing that your 800 voicemails have made obsolete? Maybe your parents still have one. They have a flashing red number on them and they always broke down.
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We all know some of the well known URL-shortening services such as 
You’ll see on the screenshot, the URL 
Your personal health requires more than just a basic physical fitness log of exercises or weight loss. A human body is an amazing machine where every single part, in some way, influences every other part. This is why it’s so scary when you or someone you love has symptoms or strange behaviors that seem to come from nowhere.
Looking to earn some extra cash for the coming holidays? Feeling the pinch of the economic downturn? Just want to make a little more money for a rainy day?
PSA purports itself to be a non-profit, donation driven organization dedicated to revealing the truth about multi-level marketing and pyramid schemes. Founder Robert FitzPatrick has written a book on the topic and has been consulted as a professional by different media outlets in the U.S. and Canada.
This is a bit of a different site, in that it is a site within a site. What the heck does that mean? Well, MLMSurvivor has had a site since 1999 that featured information about Quixtar/Amway, Equinox/Trek Alliance and other MLM’s.
You can get to it by clicking on the Original MLMSurvivor Site link.
Just in case it seems like all these sites are about Amway, well, they aren’t. The Pink Lighthouse is a blog put together by a former Mary Kay Consultant. It sure seems that the pink isn’t all that you might think!
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