Latest Tips from MakeUseOf.com

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• Cool Websites and Tools [December 1]
• Blog On Your Mobile With Wordpress 2.0 For iPhone
• Topikality – Improve Google Alerts & Get the Articles You Want
• How To Use Your PSP WiFi Scanner To Find A Wireless Internet Hotspot
• Two Geeky Methods To Do Some Quick Tweeting [Mac]
• 10 Free Online Advent Calendars With Gifts & Surprises For You & The Kids
• Flying on a Dime: The 3 Best Websites To Find Cheap Flights

Cool Websites and Tools [December 1] Posted: 01 Dec 2009 05:01 PM PST Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.   (1) CrossFit – Online training program which includes exercises and workouts that help in improving the overall physical fitness of a person. Their main website, which goes by the same name, contains detailed information about the program and the exercises included in it. There are demo videos, articles, Crossfit games and even a section for kids. Read more: CrossFit – Workout & Exercise Program Online (2) Chimply – This site allows you to generate those loading indicators and animated bars that you see on many websites these days. These indicators are often used by web developers to let the users know when the page is loading or application is doing something. Buttons and badges can be generated as well. Read more: Chimply – Generate Loading Indicators Online (3) Manuals-Search-Engine – Next time you need a manual for some software program or even a programming language head to Manuals-Search-Engine.com. It's basically a Google-powered custom search engine which lets you search for all kind of tech & software manuals online. Read more: Manuals-Search-Engine – Download Free Tech & Software Manuals Online (4) Craigslist Car Research -  Cool Mozilla Firefox add-on particularly useful when buying a car on Craigslist. It analyzes car listings on Craigslist and flags certain keywords requiring your attention such as 'accident' and the number of owners. It also gives useful info such as seller reliability and car reviews. Read more: Craigslist Car Research – Makes Buying Cars On Craigslist A Lot Easier (5) Pixable Calendar – Web tool which lets you create nice online calendars for free. What's interesting about this calendar is auto-import of your friends' birthdays from Facebook. It uses Facebook Connect to login and puts all those birthdays on your calendar in one click. It's useful for Facebook users because the recent redesign of Facebook's user interface caused the birthdays to drop below the fold in the page.  Read more: Pixable Calendar -  Online Calendar With Facebook Data Import Submit Your Web App   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. Related posts makeuseof extra #27 (96) Finally Stick To Your Resolutions With StickK (67) Cool Websites and Tools [September 9] (30) Cool Websites and Tools [September 7] (25) Cool Websites and Tools [September 6] (38)

Blog On Your Mobile With Wordpress 2.0 For iPhone Posted: 01 Dec 2009 12:01 PM PST The iron law of blogging is “keep the content coming” – it’s kind of similar to the old mantra of academia: publish or perish. Blogging is performed in many different ways, at different times, and in different places. A website-anchoring major post which requires lots of research, careful writing, extensive revision and obsessive polishing is probably best performed in quiet and private (we hope), where the blogger has peace and access to all her reference and research materials.  On the other hand, the typical daily post, a few hundred words of a more casual, maybe ephemeral, nature can be written in a diner. Then come the obvious candidates for mobile: live-blogging at a convention, show, or seminar; news-blogging on events of the day; and the “Holy Cow…you guys gotta see this!” photo-blog which suddenly appears anywhere, indoors or outside. Or the blogger wants to travel light: leave the laptop at home and post the travel-blog written on the road from a mobile. Wordpress For iPhone 2.0 For bloggers who use Wordpress, either with Wordpress.com or on self-hosted sites (version 2.7 or higher only), the newly freshened Wordpress for iPhone 2.0 App will make a useful addition to their bag of tricks – an easy way to blog from your iPhone. It’s the only app for working with Wordpress on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Also,Wordpress for iPhone is an Open Source project so interested developers can join in on the project. Comments, for example, need to be moderated and answered quickly and thoughtfully, and the writing is often on-the-fly. Wordpress for iPhone 2.0 starts up on the Comments tab; that’s the most common expected use for the mobile application. A mobile app is really ideal for this, since you can do your comment-processing at times that might otherwise be empty: travel time, waiting time at the dentist’s office, or sitting in a traffic jam. Wordpress for iPhone 2.0 is very simple to set up and use. Download the free application, fire it up and enter the blog address, user name and password. The app validates the blog that’s entered and it’s all set to go. Multiple blogs can be edited. The Comments tab can show all or only pending comments. Comments can be approved, unapproved, set as spam, or deleted. The Posts tab lists all existing posts (including drafts), and allows creating new and editing existing posts, adding tags, categorizing, and setting publication status. Its modes are Write, for creating new content; Comments, which shows a comment list filtered by the Post; Photos, for adding photos to the post, either from the iPhone’s photo library, or directly from the camera; Preview, letting the blogger have a look at her new post; and Settings, which include Publish date, optional Password, and Resize Photos, which is off by default (resized photos will publish faster but show smaller). The Pages tab lists all the blog’s pages. New pages can be written, photos added to pages, and publication status set. They’ve added some nice new features which make using Wordpress for iPhone more pleasant, secure and convenient. Gravatars (globally recognized avatars) and authors’  URLs now show in the comment list. Wordpress for iPhone now stores passwords in the iPhone’s Keychain for secure, hands-free backup. It also automatically now saves posts if the network connection gets interrupted while publishing, and restores them when it reconnects, which is a lifesaver for mobile bloggers. And if you’re dealing with multiple blogs, opening in the blog last used is handy behavior, too. We’d all like to have the ability to do mobile audio or video blogging.  They have plans to add these features in a future release. (Remember, this is Open Source, so interested parties can join in the fun.) Now I’m looking for any excuse to go on the road and do some blogging! If you’re interested in mobile blogging, please also have a look at: How To Post To Blogger With Your Cellphone Four Great Blogging Apps For The iPhone Do you use Wordpress for the iPhone? If so, what do you like / dislike about it?   What new features would you like to see in a future release? Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts The Best New Features Of Wordpress 2.8 (14) The 4 Great Blogging Apps For The iPhone (13) ScribeFire vs DeepestSender: One Blogging Addon to Rule Them All! (18) Blog Directly From Your WM Device Via Windows Live Writer Mobile Beta (5) 3 Firefox Add-Ons To Help You Blog More Easily (19)

Topikality – Improve Google Alerts & Get the Articles You Want Posted: 01 Dec 2009 11:01 AM PST Are you familiar with the word (or is it a modern day fact) – information overload? Or perhaps the more street wise phrase – swamped with info? A typical net junkie like me has RSS, email newsletters, web search, Twitter and Google Alerts set up to scavenge content from the web. The delete button gets used the most when I am not able to read through all the content that the above tools churn out. The flood of information notwithstanding, the search and 'hunger' for more doesn't cease. It's almost like the information we have is never enough. Perhaps that explains why I tried out the web application called Topikality and maybe by the time you finish with this post, you will also give it a whirl. Topikality (Beta) gathers for you what it thinks are articles of your interest. It's like a filter for all the clutter. Sort of like an alternative to Google Alerts but it's a bit different from Google's service. The site explains the intelligence behind its search, collect and deliver technology. Let me just elaborate it a bit over here with my own example. I like reading articles on technology, especially web apps and freeware. My second area of interest is about life hacks – self improvement articles. So, I defer to Topikality and its search intelligence to scour it out for me. A free registration and log-in and I reach My topiks page where I need to setup my 'topiks' of interest. So, here I start creating a new 'topik'. Each field has a nice help balloon next to it. Fill in the fields with the kind of keywords you want Topikality to search for. There is also an Advanced Query builder where you can build a Boolean search using search operators. Save…and your first 'topik' gets created. Similarly, you can create many more search filters for the kinds of articles you want delivered. For building search queries, you can refer to a few articles and see what the common keywords they use. I have also put in a few relevant websites of my own using the suggest a web site or blog link on the sidebar. Aha! I see that I already have a few articles lined up. Topikality has gone to work and searched the internet for articles relevant to my keyword suggestions. According to Topikality, it is not just a notification system like Google Alert which delivers pages that merely contain the keywords without looking into the context of the whole article. This is where Topikality's intelligence kicks in and asks for a bit of active participation from my end. In order to fine tune Topikality's relevance, I need to train it a bit. By voting each article returned by Topikality's search according to more like this or less like this, I begin training the system to see what I like and begin delivering me similar articles. Topikality says that after I vote 50 or so times I would have fine tuned the search algorithm that the web app uses. I don't need to login to Topikality to get my daily 'unclutter' of articles. I am getting it all into my inbox. With a click on the RSS button, I can also get each of my Topiks into my feed reader. The Preferences is the place where I can set things like email update periods, the visibility of the voting frame etc. So Will Topikality Replace Google Alerts Which I Have Set Up? Perhaps. Topikality, with its feature to spot trends in the articles I like (or dislike), gives me more control to find the needles in the web haystack. The web app's Statistical Machine Learning technology looks at the whole context of the article instead of just keywords. The promise of the site is that the longer I vote an article, the better it will get for me. In order for me to tag an article with my preference, Topikality needs to deliver the article to me through a search. I couldn't find any information on how Topikality searches for the articles i.e. which search engine (s) does it use. Does it go as deep as a well established web crawler like Google? If it does, then the allied intelligent technology is certainly an improvement over Google Alerts. Well, I am still voting and the results are coming in. Some hits and some misses as is usual for a search engine based service. What's more important is that I am getting a pile to read. Yes, there is so much stuff out there. Why not give Topikality a try and get some into your mail inbox. 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 Wakoopa – Find Out What Software You (And Others) Use Most (11) View Your Website’s Visitors’ IP Address & Keep Statistics (14) View A Multi-Page Article On One Single Page With PageZipper (14) Use Stacks To Save Websites For Later Reading [Mac] (17) Use Household Register 2010 To Maintain A Home Inventory (7)

How To Use Your PSP WiFi Scanner To Find A Wireless Internet Hotspot Posted: 01 Dec 2009 10:01 AM PST We wouldn’t have dreamed of it a decade ago but the internet has become an incredibly important facet of mobile devices. It’s almost unthinkable to have a cellphone without 3G or GPRS and a WiFi adapter for wireless internet is included on all things portable. Sony’s PSP was a pioneer in this digital stretch. It was one of the first gaming devices that looked beyond the games; including music and movie playback, and WiFi capability. Although the PlayStation Portable has been out for a while now, its web browser is still powerful enough to enjoy browsing the web. It supports Flash and Java, and its capabilities go way beyond most mobile devices. Since the PSP uses WiFi, you will need a wireless access point to connect to the internet. Most people have a wireless router at home these days, otherwise you can purchase a USB WiFi transmitter for your computer, but when you’re on the move you’ve got to improvise. Below are two ways to use that built-in PSP WiFi scanner and find a hot spot on the go. Note that there are two kinds of unencrypted hot spots: public hot spots – like the one at Starbucks or in the park, meant to share an internet connection , albeit freely – and unsecured private networks, which you can access because there’s no password needed. Connecting to a private network without prior consent from the owner is illegal in most countries, and can result in heavy fines. MakeUseOf will not assume any legal liability in the matter. Use Your PSP WiFi Scanner Your PSP has a built in WiFi scanner, which you can use to search for hot spots. Doing so is very easy. Make sure the WLAN switch, as depicted below, is turned on. From the main menu, go to Settings -> Network Settings. A connection wizard will pop up. First you’ll be presented with a choice between Ad Hoc and Infrastructure Mode. We’ll choose Infrastructure Mode, because the former is used to connect two PSPs without using an existing network. If this is your first time running the wizard on that location, and I’m assuming it is, you need to create a new connection. Otherwise choose one from the list. You’ll be asked to enter a few basic details, like the connection name. Changing this is not at all required, but would be useful if you plan on using this same hotspot in the future. You’ll be asked whether you want to scan for available access points, or enter the network details manually. We’re of course using the scan function. As you can see in the screenshot below, your PSP will present you with all available access points, ranked by signal strength. Unless you know the network, you’ll need to choose one with security attribute – none. It often happens that there are no access points directly available. You can move to another position, go back (by pressing O) and scan again. Good places to look for public hotspots are train stations, big malls, bistros and other (preferably big) public places. Alternative: Use Road Dog WiFi Sniffer (Homebrew) Note that this application is homebrew – which basicly means it’s cooked up by an amateur software developer. Sony doesn’t allow you to run homebrew on your PSP by default though so you’ll have to put a custom firmware on your device first. Doing so will open a whole new world of community software development, including translation apps, PDF readers and GameBoy emulators. We previously wrote a comprehensive MakeUseOf Manual to Down- and Upgrading Your PSP. Road Dog is a homebrew PSP application that allows you to sniff for WiFi connections. This means that, unlike when using the default PSP WiFi scanner, your device will keep rescanning for potential access points. By monitoring the signal connection, you can use it to monitor and even locate hotspots while walking or driving around. Thanks to its voiced interface, Road Dog is ultimately fit to use while driving around towards that hotspot. Download it for Phat PSP here, or check out the release for PSP Slim and Lite. Do you know other ways to find a hotspot? Tell us in the comments section below! Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts JoikuSpot – Connect Your Laptop to Internet via Cell Phone (6) How To Troubleshoot Weak Wireless Connections (15) How To Share The Internet Connection Between Mac and PC (17) How To Set Up Your Own Secured Wi-Fi Hotspot (16) How To Secure Your D-Link Wireless Router (15)

Two Geeky Methods To Do Some Quick Tweeting [Mac] Posted: 01 Dec 2009 08:01 AM PST Call me old fashioned, call me a caveman but until recently, I haven’t found any solid reason to use Twitter. I even have to go to Wikipedia to find a reason. According to Wikipedia, Twitter is: a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. So, based on the definition, I see tweeting as nothing but mass short text messaging of a user’s current status. Some people might find the activity fun, but that’s just not my cup of tea. I wanted to find out other benefits from the service that turn millions of users to tweet actively everyday. Six Reasons To Tweet Reading further on the Wikipedia page, I found out that there are six categories of tweets: news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational, and pass-along value. A few of these might serve as a good enough reason for me to start exploring. Standard usage of Twitter requires users to log in to the site to be able to post and follow tweets. Not very friendly for real-time status updates. That’s why users always try to find other more comfortable ways to tweet. During my first few days of exploring Twitter, I found some geeky methods to issue a quick tweet under Mac. It’s a combination of using Quicksilver/Google Quick Search Box (QSB) to post and GeekTool to display the tweets. The Quick Tweet Post If you are a Quicksilver or QSB user, you can post quick tweets using only a few keystrokes. Quicksilver needs an additional script or plugin to make it work with Twitter, while QSB comes with the feature built in. The basic steps of using either Quicksilver or QSB to tweet are more or less the same, but since Quicksilver does not get along well with Snow Leopard in my Mac, I used QSB instead. Here are the steps to issue your quick tweet: First, you need to set up your Twitter account in QSB. Click on the little arrow on the right side of the QSB window and choose Preferences (or use Command + Comma while the QSB window is open) Then click the Accounts tab, click Add Account and choose Twitter from the Account Type. With your Twitter account set up, you can continue with the quick tweets. Invoke QSB (using Command + Space or hit the Command key twice) Write down your micro-post and then press the right arrow button. Choose “send Twitter status” action Hit enter to send the post The Display Tweeting is not only posting personal micro-blogs but also about following others. There’s a perfect GeekTool script to display your friends’ tweets on your desktop called Twitterbuddy. Download and unzip the installation package to a location in your hard drive. You have to install the script by double clicking the install.command file inside the Twitterbuddy folder. The installation will run in Terminal. Use command twitterbuddy -h in Terminal to get the list of available (GeekTool) commands. The basic command would be: /usr/local/bin/twitterbuddy -u username -p password -n x Change “username” “password” and “x” with the appropriate value where “x” is the number of tweets that you want to have displayed. The Fix New Twitterbuddy users might get this connection error: “Could not connect with twitter: Did you specify a username and a password?“. That’s because the script will only work with the older versions of twitter.gem (version 0.44 and below), while the installation process will download the latest version of twitter.gem (version 0.77 at the time of writing). To fix the problem, you have to manually uninstall the latest twitter.gem and install the older one. Go to RubyForge: Twitter: Project Filelist page and download version 0.4.4. Open Terminal and type this command: sudo gem uninstall twitter And hit enter Then continue with this command: sudo gem install drag and drop the downloaded file to Terminal window to complete the command, and hit enter. After this re-installation, everything should work fine. Note: Some users have reported that their Twitterbuddy installation requires a restart before working properly. The Clients If you prefer the no-hassle way, you could just use a Twitter client to post and follow tweets. Two alternatives that I found are: Twitterific and Tweetie. Both are available in two versions: free ad-supported version and paid version. What about you? Do you tweet? What is your favorite tweeting method? Share using the comments below. Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts Seesmic – Like Twitter, Plurk, Jaiku Or Pownce But With Video (9) Psst…Do You Plurk? (23) Kwippy – Social Networking…Revised. (BETA Invites Included!) (5) Hoot! An In-Depth Look At Online Twitter Client – HootSuite (22) Five Tantalizing Twitter Tools To Tickle Your Tonsils (8)

10 Free Online Advent Calendars With Gifts & Surprises For You & The Kids Posted: 01 Dec 2009 06:01 AM PST Advent calendars are originally German to celebrate and count down the days of Advent, climaxing in the celebration of Christmas Eve on December 24th. Meanwhile, advent calendars are known in literally all cultures that celebrate Christmas. The traditional calendar contains 24 randomly positioned doors on a cardboard. Starting on December 1st, one door per day, starting with door number 1, is opened. Behind the doors used to be little festive pictures. However, over the years pieces of chocolate have become more popular. During the last third of the 20th century it has become a custom to handcraft more elaborate “calendars” that hold little gifts, such as chocolate, socks, nuts, pencils or anything else that is either delicious or useful. The calendar doors transformed into little sacks or gift boxes. Today, online calendars are a modern way to share recipes, Christmas stories, traditions, poems or psalms. Some companies have set up advent calendars to give away gifts to their customers. Here are 10 randomly sorted free online advent calendars from different backgrounds. They hold little surprises for you on each day of December up until Christmas. 1. Boowa & Kwala An online advent calendar to countdown to Christmas with little seasonal surprises each day. 2. Presentation Magazine There is no indication as to what this online advent calendar has in store, but my wild guess is that it is probably more suited for adults interested in improving their presentation skills. 3. Online Bingo Do you enjoy Bingo? Then this one is for you! Since it’s a UK calendar, where Christmas isn’t celebrated until December 25th it has 25 doors. Each door will contain Bingo-related freebies and surprises. 4. Woodlands Junior School This UK school has an interactive online advent calendar which shares 25 bits of information about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. 5. National Museums Liverpool An educational and fun advent calendar. 6. Electric December This website has been creating online advent calendars for over 10 years. Each year they collect films and digital treats to make up an incredibly creative and unique calendar. Watch out for what they have in store this year. 7. Yule in Iceland This page educates its readers about Christmas or rather Yule celebrations in Iceland. 8. Greg’s Advent Calendar Another 25 day advent calendar with little information treats behind each door. 9. St. Margaret Mary This Christian advent calendar features a Bible verse and a matching image for each of 25 days until Christmas plus the two last days of November. 10. Holidays On The Net Holidays on the net has compiled an advent calendar filled with facts, figures, and folklore related to the month of December. About.com has a list of 25 advent activities with which parents and their children can countdown to Christmas. They also have many suggestions for handcrafted advent calendars. If you speak German, check out this list for online Adventskalender or the following advent calendars: CHIP Online Download Adventskalender 2009, TATONKA Adventskalender, Toshiba & McAfee Adventszauber, MP3 Adventskalender 2009, Gedichte Garten Adventskalender, Weihnachten-Online Adventskalender 2009, Saarlouis-Roden Adventskalender, Weihnachtsideen24.de Adventskalender. Did I miss your favorite free online advent calendar? Please hurry and share the link with the rest of us! Image credits: mommyof9 Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section! Become a MakeUseOf fan on Facebook? – Our photos, MakeUseOf specials and more. Related posts 50 Tools & Resources For Christmas Gift Ideas (15) Top Educational Websites For Children That Are Fun (30) Top 8 Sites To Listen To Free Christmas Music Online (33) Top 10 Free Genealogy Websites to Find Ancestors (26) ToddlerKeys Makes Your Windows Computer Baby Friendly! (9)

Flying on a Dime: The 3 Best Websites To Find Cheap Flights Posted: 01 Dec 2009 04:01 AM PST The holiday season is upon us and many of us are planning trips. A question I get all the time is how can I find a cheap flight?  To answer that question, I will cover 3 cheap flight websites for your flying escapades – 2 of them have worked great for me flying from the United States to all over the world and the last one was suggested by the MakeUseOf founder Aibek Esengulov for being a great website for finding flights from Europe to elsewhere. So hopefully we have got you covered with these 3 sites: CheapFlights (US only) – CheapFlights is my first go-to cheap flight website to start looking for inexpensive flights. I have probably used them over 100 times in the last 5 or 6 years. I consistently find good deals and most of the time at the last minute. The beauty about CheapFlights is that you can let the site tell you when it would be the best time to fly. By checking the check box on the homepage that says your dates are flexible, it will do the leg work for you trying to discover the best date and time to fly for the best price. Go ahead and fill out where you are coming from and going to select your flexibility and hit the find deals now button. Once you hit that button, the site will do its magic searching like so: You will see the dates are scattered over the next month or so – see if one floats your boat and click on it to go to the corresponding site and book it! Next up is Cheapo Air. Cheapo Air has international flights both ways. When you get to their homepage it will look like every other major air flight finding service but it will find you some seriously cheap flights – there might be 2 or 3 stops or even a layover – but if cheap is your goal here you will find a flight. You have to specify an exact date and time range to where you are going and it will find you the cheapest rates available. Cheapo Air returned cheap flights as you can see below: $219! That beats our original site by $70. For someone looking to to save some money, not bad! The trip includes 1 hour and 2 minutes of a layover in Atlanta and they switched my home airport from JFK to Newark, not bad! Our last site is called SkyScanner which does United States flights as well as European flights. SkyScanner should be your site of choice for booking flights that start or end outside of the United States. Fill out your information and let's see what she returns… So going from the United States to the Bahamas costs a lot more from here, but looking for airfares from the United Kingdom to New York we see some great deals: They let you build your round trip by selecting one flight from the left and one from the right. You can find some great deals from all three of these sites.  But I’m sure there are plenty of other sites where you get your cheap flights from. Feel free to share your favorite sites 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 6 Useful Last-Minute Booking Sites For Your Next Trip (4) 6 Sites To Make Flying A Whole Lot Easier (15) 5 Comparison Websites that WILL Save you Money (28) 10 Travel Websites that should be Bookmarked (19) Top 5 Airline Flight Tracking Websites (12)

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